Exclusive Cover Reveal of TECHNICOLOR HORSES by Michael Credico

Electric Literature is pleased to reveal the cover of Technicolor Horses by Michael Credico, which will be published on April 6, 2027 by Autumn House Press. You can pre-order your copy here.

Set in a near-future version of the American Midwest, Michael Credico’s novella, Technicolor Horses, explores the disaster of an Ohio community caught in chaos and how trust erodes alongside their drought-ridden ecosystem.

Water is scarce. Loved ones are missing. Systems are breaking down. And nobody seems able to make sense of it all. Technicolor Horses is part warning, part elegy, and part deeply human yearning for what might still be possible, taking readers through a surrealist heartland where no one is sure who’s still in charge. In a whirlwind of ditchdiggers replaced by interns, protestors wearing rubber horse masks, flooded streets and lost spouses and children, these fragmented stories ask what happens when the familiar unravels—when memory lapses, language fails, and even a flood feels personal.

With dry observation and quiet sorrow, Credico builds his narrative on the lives shaped by loss, surveillance, and strange, flickering, dwindling hope in a world with few answers and no real heroes. And though the horses, once vivid, begin to fade, they don’t stop loping.

Here’s the cover, designed by Kinsley Stocum:

Michael Credico: I tend to write fixated on certain images and ideas. Sometimes for years at a time. I have phases. My first book, Heartland Calamitous, was, essentially, The Fish Book. Technicolor Horses is very much The Horse Book. I was watching a lot of acid and “electric” westerns. I kept imagining what if Alejandro Jodorowsky had attempted to adapt Wise Blood instead of Dune. I mentioned my interest in these things when we began to think about the cover direction. Kinsley provided this series of strange archival renderings of horses, including the drawing of horses in various states of horseness that ended up being used. I love how bright and outrageous things turned out. I encounter hundreds of books of fiction and poetry each day. I’m a library worker whose main responsibility is getting books from here to there and back again. Doing a job like this for so many years, you really appreciate when a cover breaks up the monotony a bit. I think this one does that. More than anything, I’m grateful to Kinsley for creating something that I think will meaningfully and truthfully inform how readers experience my weird little book.

Kinsley Stocum: I like to begin my process by requesting and reviewing inspiration provided by the author, whatever they want to provide: images, colors, other book covers, etc. In this case, Michael was very helpful in narrowing my focus. The inspo he provided was minimalist, rich and colorful, with an emphasis on Spanish-language book covers and movie posters, specifically providing a painting by Leonora Carrington and the poster for the 1932 movie Wild Horse Mesa. My own personal style trends toward painterly and collage-focused, playing with open source, public domain, and found materials. With all that in mind, I went hunting for additional graphic inspiration, and through my stock of illustrative material for—what else?—horses. I wanted the cover to be vibrant, evocative in some way of the chaos within the book, with a bold and jaunty title, and to feel like it was made by hand more than by computer. The final design incorporates a 1622 etching by Jacques Callot called Horses Running Free, from The Caprices (CC0 Public Domain Designation, currently off view at The Art Institute of Chicago).