A fan called Amity Lee recently posted this picture of the Japanese paperback editions of The Saga Of Darren Shan. She'd taken off their glossy dust covers to find pictures on the covers of the books inside, and realised that if you put them all together, they formed a huge single picture, which you can see in the photo below. She was amazed by the beautiful work that had gone into this, and to be honest -- so was I!!!

I genuinely can't recall whether or not I knew about this before I saw Amity Lee's photo. The books were published a long time ago, so it's perfectly possible that I was told about this at the time, and have simply forgotten over the years, but equally there's a fair chance that this was something that slipped my notice at the time. These came out during the peak years of my public success, when I was jetting all around the world on tour, and new editions of my work were coming out somewhere on the planet almost every month or two. It was a lovely, crazy time, and some big things did pass me by during all the hubbub -- years later, I'd find holes in my collection and notice that I hadn't been sent certain books by certain publishers -- hell, there were even some British editions that were never sent to me, and they were my closest publishers of all, the ones I was most in contact with!

So, yeah, it's perfectly feasible that my Japanese publishers included this secret covers design without telling me, or that they did tell me but I then forgot it and never put the covers together once the paperbacks had all been sent to me. Or, yeah, maybe I've seen them all together like this before and simply forgot.

Either way. they look absolutely stunning, so I'm delighted to be able to share them with you all. (Maybe "again," if I've shared them here in the past!)

If you'd like to check out what the books look like with their dust covers on, click here: https://www.darrenshan.com/covers/country/japan-the-saga-of-darren-shan

One thing I haven't forgotten about (yet!) is the August issue of the Shanville Monthly, which went live a few days ago with all the latest Darren Shan news and updates: https://www.darrenshan.com/news/shanville-monthly