Got Lurid?

The first thing I'll do with a new hardcover is remove the dust jacket and store it somewhere safe. Replace it when I'm done, of course, and ready to store it on the shelf.

This one I did with perhaps a greater degree of pleasure than usual. Yeah, OK, Southern Cali hardboiled Sixties surfer genre, pretty much calls for lurid neon type on the cover. Don't have much of a problem with that. No, it's the hideous neon-pink gradient wash the designer put on the inner flaps that does it for me. I couldn't go one sentence without my eye straying off the page and staring fixedly at the strange, strange design choice, me thinking whyyyyyy?

Picked it up yesterday, only had time for one chapter last night. No immediate impressions formed yet, up or down. I did get a pretty serious gut-laff from the stoner lawyer, Sauncho Smilax, as Doc is using his One Phone Call to try to get out of jail:

"It's like Donald and Goofy, right, and they're out in a life raft, adrift at sea? for what looks like weeks? and what you start noticing after a while, in Donald's closeups, is that he has whisker stubble? like, growing out of his beak? You get the significance of that?"

"If I find a minute to think about it, Saunch, but meantime here comes Bigfoot and he's got that look, so if you could repeat the number back, OK, and--"

"We've always had this image of Donald Duck, we assume it's how he looks all the time in his normal life, but in fact he's always had to go in every day and shave his beak. The way I figure, it has to be Daisy. You know, which means, what other grooming demands is that chick laying on him, right?"