What do you think of when you think of the word scouring? I imagine myself on a horse drawn covered wagon with fifteen mustangs pulling me, galloping wildly, leather straps and buckles jostling and snapping and clanging, each horses eyes open frighteningly wide showing the little sliver of white, saliva ribboning from their mouths, my one hand on the reins, the other shielding the sun from my eyes, looking out across the desert landscape rapidly coming towards me then disappearing, wind thundering in my ears, hollering through a dry and cracked throat at the horses, “H-yaw! H-yaw!“, looking for someone. A fugitive, a doctor, a law man. Someone who holds my life and the lives of others in their hands.

I learned a couple years ago during a game of Scatagories that it really means “to rub hard especially with a rough material for cleansing.”

It also means “to suffer from diarrhea or dysentery” but that’s not really the point. I was scouring the internet this morning, in only one sense of the word, looking for a good book cover for this weeks BBCDW and basically getting a little depressed at the amount of bullshit out there. Then, in my darkest hour, this little diamond popped out of the rough.

Johannes Cabal the Necromancer turns the Faust legend on it’s ear as a man who’s sold his soul to learn the secrets of raising the dead now tries to win it back from the Devil by getting 100 people to commit their souls to be damned. Sounds like it might run the risk of either being some lame-ass genre bullshit or it could be really awesome.

The woodcut skeleton dude, the black and white with a splash of blood red, it all evokes a healthy dose of deliciously evil fun. Well done, nameless Double Day designer.