We’re pleased to share the cover of Ruyan Meng’s forthcoming novel The Morgue Keeper, due out on October 15, 2025 from 7.13 Books. Here’s how the publisher describes the book:
In 1966, as a brutal revolution grips his city, morgue keeper Qing Yuan spends his nights cleaning bodies in silence—until a viciously murdered woman, known only as “#19,” shatters his routine, and he becomes entangled in an existential quest to uncover the truth behind her fate.
“My stories are inspired by true events in a ‘Worker Village’ — a Soviet-style residential compound,” Meng said of her novel. “In my tales, I have recreated this world: in microcosm, all human life is here.”
Meng and editor D. Foy collaborated on the book’s cover. Foy had this to say about the aesthetic used for it:
The hero of The Morgue Keeper ultimately finds himself arrested by Mao Zedong’s Red Guard and imprisoned in a sweltering coal room infested with mosquitoes. The mosquito is nothing if not implacable. Its destruction mounts by degrees. Dispatching upwards of a million people a year, it is, in fact, the most dangerous animal on the planet. In these and in many other regards, the mosquito functions very much like totalitarianism and is thus a potent symbol of its multifaceted depravity. The minimalism of the book’s cover design — a single mosquito, cartoonishly diabolical, in a void of pleasant butter yellow — is at once elegant and creepy. Its effect is to provoke a deceptive confusion. Something is wrong here, we feel before the image, but we’re helpless to say just what. The people who fall to a dictator’s regime often don’t grasp the full sweep of its aim till they have been rendered powerless bit by bit. By the time they realize their jeopardy in the grip of what had seemed a series of developments too absurd to be true, the chance for escape has passed.
The Morgue Keeper will be available wherever books are sold on October 15, 2025.