Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children #8

Volume 8 of Dave Louapre and Dan Sweetman's quietly singular Piranha Press anthology arrives with a cover that lets the watercolor artwork do all the talking — a melancholy, dreamlike painting of weathered curved metal shapes rising from a flat landscape, framed by telephone poles and a brooding overcast sky. Sweetman's painterly cover has an almost roadside-America stillness to it, the kind of image that feels both mundane and quietly unsettling. With a story titled "Die Rainbow Die: A Story of Hope," this 1990 mature-readers issue promises exactly the bittersweet, offbeat tension that made Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children one of the more distinctive voices of its era.