Cover Art and Costco

Which book shall I buy?

Entering Costco, I felt like a real American, a bonafide overspending, gluttonous, credit-card-maxing member of my birth country, ready to pledge my allegiance to all that promises to raise my self-esteem and my sense of entitlement.

Be honest, doesn’t your common sense and fiscal rectitude recede when you enter a Costco warehouse? If you’re like me, a neural ball of me-wantsa-everything starts to pulse, and you find yourself strolling up and down the aisles with your oversized shopping cart, itching to oversize your life with five years worth of trash bags and enough wrapping paper to cover your walls. I often peruse other people’s carts, wondering what fabulous object I’ve missed. Could be the latest Keurig coffeemaker, or the fake-Ugg boots, or the cutesy tabbed-style chopping boards. I kid you not. Check them out right here.

After awhile the florescent lights coupled with quantitudinous excess send me into the consumer’s equivalent of insulin shock. Today was a prime example. Last night my nifty space heater almost fried the house down. Since I’d bought it at Costco many moons ago, I decided, Yes, I need this one thing, this is legit, this is okay. To further my needy resolve to partake of the — eh hem — American dream, I invited my 80-year-old mother to accompany me. This may seem strange, but getting her out of the house and walking around was a good deed. Really. (I am serious about that if nothing else in this post.) She doesn’t eat much anymore, so I also insisted that we stop at every, and mean every, food sampling.

I found a space heater, all right, but I also found a light box, a pound of shrimp (with cocktail sauce), a Brita water pitcher, a mongo-sized bottle of Neutrogena body bath, a — never mind — needless to say, I also found a book. While my mom jotted down the titles of books to check out of the library, I found my eye drawn to one book. This was a case of cover art successfully sucking me in. I’d never heard of CEMETERY GIRL’s author, but that stark white cover with the creepy, creeping branches about to take over the face? Love it! And the title too.

So hats off to the cover artist who managed to catch my glazed and by-then-headachy attention.