How Cover Art Shaped My Story, Part Two

So I had the setting for the second book in my series, Thin Places.

I’ve always been intrigued by the Pine Barrens in New Jersey. One of the largest unsettled regions in the Northeast U.S. (with nearly one million acres of forest), it was the perfect spot for my next supernatural thriller. And it had a famous resident, the Jersey Devil.

According to legend, the Jersey Devil is either the thirteenth child of a woman who had grown weary of childbearing and cursed her next offspring as “the devil”, or the Devil is an unidentified cryptid with a goat-like head, bat-like wings and horns. Whatever its origins, there have been numerous sightings of the Devil over the years. Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother, even claimed to encounter the creature in 1820.

A spooky place with a legendary creature seemed like an ideal place to set my story. But as I developed the plot, the Jersey Devil angle just didn’t work for me. Part of the problem was that it has been used before. A LOT. The creature has made an appearance in (to name a few) The X-Files, What We Do in The Shadows, The Last Broadcast, and The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest. The Jersey Devil had a ‘been there, done that’ feel to it.

I was determined to keep the setting, so I decided to focus more on the Pine Barrens itself.

The history of this region proved to be just as interesting as its famous resident.

One of the many abandoned buildings in the Pine Barrens

Long a haven for highwaymen, pirates, moonshiners, renegade soldiers and runaway slaves, the Pine Barrens had an unsettled, frontier quality to it. I quickly decided that the Barrens qualified as a thin place, a spot in the physical world where the natural and the supernatural overlap.

But what supernatural creature would my characters encounter in this isolated spot in New Jersey?

I knew I wanted to use H.P. Lovecraft’s nightgaunts in my story. These creatures would guide my main character Ellen Logan through the Dreamlands. Artist Paul Carrick painted a nightgaunt for the cover of my book. As I sat at my desk one day, thinking about my story and looking at Paul’s creation, something clicked. I always thought the lightbulb going off in someone’s head was a cliché, but it happened to me. The idea was as sudden as it was enlightening.

Thin Places cover

The nightgaunts and the Jersey Devil were one and the same. These interdimensional creatures, and not some mythical Satanic offspring, were the origins of all the tales about the “strange creatures” in the woods. Nightgaunts use the isolated location of the Barrens to shuttle between their world and ours.

So, a spooky setting? Check.

A legendary creature that has a reason to be in the Barrens? Check.

Now, I needed an event to connect the two.

Paul Carrick painted a red sky behind the creature and challenged me to come up with a story for it.

Wildfires? A solar flare? Some other weird cosmic event?

I was planning to visit the Pine Barrens on a research trip, so I dug in and did more research. And there, in the pages of an unconventional guidebook, Weird New Jersey, I found the missing link.

Curious what it is?

Stay tuned for the last installment of How Cover Art Shaped My Story.