There is a napkin somewhere in the Frekk studio with a heart drawn on it. Not a valentine heart. An anatomical one, chambers and aorta, sketched out during a meeting. That napkin is where this cover began.

Many who has depicted Frankenstein has depicted the creature. The flat head, the neck bolts. We wanted this piece to be about the reckless scientist who pushed past every boundary available to him, built something he couldn't control, and left the consequences to everyone else.
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The tech industry has spent the better part of two decades celebrating a particular type of founder. Visionary and boundary-pushing. They build the thing and the rest of us live with it. Frankenstein was the original Silicon Valley founder. Shelley wrote him in 1818.
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Sasha Molochko, who illustrates for Frekk from Ukraine, drew the whole thing by hand. The doctor stands with his back to us, small, facing the enormous heart that towers over him. His creation. When Sasha sent through the finished piece, what struck me first was how dark it was without being cold. Gothic, but with something still beating at the centre of it.
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The hand drawing was not a stylistic choice so much as a position. There is a particular kind of image being produced right now, at scale, by people who have built tools that do the making for them. We were not interested in that. One shot to get it right tends to produce different work than infinite attempts with infinite rollback. That, too, felt like the right way to make a cover for this book.

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