More Words, Deeper Hole

Not to mention the fact that if the pictured woman's deliberately bared camera-facing back with a slightly glowing brand(? tattoo?) is supposed to be some kind of satirical commentary on the cliched "back to the camera and showing off a tramp stamp" pose that was so popular on paranormal romance book covers up until quite recently, I don't think it really works. For one thing, the basic composition of the picture as a whole is too complicated and involves too many cryptically mysterious elements. Unless the cover artist got to read all or most of the stories from the collection and managed to incorporate elements from a bunch of different ones into a single image, which will only really make sense once the person looking at the book has read those stories too.