Roger Vaillancourt, author of Un-ruined (Malarkey, 2022), has a new book coming out called The Inaccessible Rail. This is what the cover looks like:

This book will probably be the end of me because not only do I have trouble spelling Roger’s last name, I also struggle with “inaccessible.” But the book is good and that makes it worth the risk of me looking stupid.

I love Un-ruined. It is the first book I would recommend if someone said they wanted to make a movie of one of our books. If you also loved Un-ruined there is really no guarantee you’ll love The Inaccessible Rail because it’s wildly different. I mean, you probably will still love it, but for different reasons. It’s remarkable that Roger has such wildly different books in him. I believe that’s called range.

Roger asked me to ask John Chrostek to make the cover because he had loved what John did with Boxcutters. John also ended up, kind of last minute, making the cover for The Walls Are Closing In On Us by Joshua Trent Brown, and he’s slated to do another one, for a title we haven’t announced yet . . . If you happen to be looking for someone to design a book cover, wholeheartedly recommend asking John.

The cover process for Rail was so smooth I hardly paid attention to it. I offered little input other than “I dig them all so draft four is cool with me.”

It helped that Roger had something he wanted to shoot for with the cover: “I had a weird persistent image in my mind related to the book that I wanted to point you at. I'm not specifically trying to drive the cover design, but it's sticking like a splinter and so have to mention it to you. If you're feeling the vibe with it, do what you will with it. If you're finding it doesn't work at all as any part of the design, I get that too and trust your judgment on what's best to wrap this strange little book. The image is from a 1927 book that's in the public domain, and available from the internet archive. It's called The Lonely Island, and it features an illustration of the inaccessible island rail, of the actual animal, alone in a kind of desolate environment that I find really kind of evocative. In my rumination on the image, I imagined essentially a recursion of the ideas of the bird within the bird, replacing the actuality of the bird . . . . The connection to the text for me comes from the fact that the narrator of the book identifies with the bird and is very much stuck in his own head, somewhat exiled from his true situation, which is populated by people but also rather desolate.”

John turned it all around rather quickly and now we have another lovely cover to add to our collection of lovely book covers, and in October 2026 you can see this one in real life if you order a copy of Roger’s book or join or already are a subscriber to our book club. 

For the rest of this year everything on our site is 15% off with code MALARKEY at checkout, but you can use the code RAIL to get 20% off The Inaccessible Rail.

Preorder a signed copy of The Inaccessible Rail