Enchanted

Yes, as my colleagues are saying, the modernity of the silhouetted figures is just a little too obvious. You want them to look medieval, the figures need to have more flowing cloaks and robes and the like, optionally with pointy hoods or hats. Apart from the Vikings, most people back then weren’t able to spend much time on hygiene, which is one reason why they wore so much outer clothing: to cover their ragged hair that they were fortunate to be able to shear once or twice a year, and to contain to however limited a degree the foulest of their body odors.

That’s also why the moderately long-haired fellow with all the rather evil-looking energy crackling between his fingers looks more like an appropriately medieval man, albeit a rather shady one. More to the point, considering that your description suggests this story is going to be told mainly from the point of view of the protagonists, having so much emphasis on what looks to be the antagonist misdirects your target audience’s attention to him from the father and son who are supposed to be the main characters. If that guy playing with all the sickly-green glowy stuff is actually supposed to be the protagonist, well… (A) you don’t need to have him on the cover more than once and (B) some milder blue or white or yellow energy and a friendlier expression on his face would greatly improve everyone’s first impressions of him.

As my colleagues have also pointed out, you may need to be a little more specific about the genre too: what age group are you targeting here, and how mature is the content intended to be? Obviously, this isn’t kids’ stuff if you’re dealing with such grim n’ gritty subjects as a child’s murder most foul and creeping evils that threaten the innocent, but are we talking about subtly mature content as seen in The Shack (the rape and murder of a little girl driving the plot being all off-screen) or are we talking more chillingly explicit stuff like the grotesque atrocities of A Clockwork Orange (including a lot of scenes which Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film adaptation actually had to tone down significantly from the book)? To be more concise, is this story young adult, or just plain adult?

Being “high Christian fantasy” as you put it doesn’t automatically answer these questions. If you’ve read the Bible in any depth at all (especially such hair-raising accounts as the ones given in the book of Judges), you know it was never intended to be mere children’s literature. So too, even if the functional magic in this story serves as a kind of family-friendly firearm in place of the much messier business of physical combat with bladed weapons, even bloodless violence can get pretty disturbing in certain contexts (as repeatedly demonstrated in Disney’s animated television series Gargoyles, of all places).

The reason I ask these questions is that the maturity level determines a lot about which way you should go: the more family-friendly it is, the more saturated the colors should be and the cleaner everyone and everything on the cover should look (even if you do have to engage in a little artistic license about how much hygiene would really be possible in your characters’ specific circumstances). The more mature and less family-friendly, the more washed-out and polarized the colors should be and the more ragged and hard-bitten everyone on the cover should look. That’s the way the maturity spectrum for fantasy novels typically works.

As it stands, in addition to looking too modern, your father-and-son silhouette suggests a more family-friendly approach while the sinister anything-but-family-friendly guy generating all that sickly green energy looks like he might have immigrated into your story from Game of Thrones. To get the attention of your target audience, you’re going to have to choose between one or the other of these elements. Mixed messages will only confuse your prospective readers.

I am rarely a fan of silhouettes. One problem is that unless they are absolutely unambiguous it can be difficult for a potential reader to understand what is supposed to be going on.

This is even more especially true in this case where it is important to understand immediately what these figures represent. As someone else pointed out: there is absolutely no indication of “mage and son.”

Aside from the obvious fantasy element of the main figure and the ball of light he is apparently conjuring up, I really don’t see anything that conveys any of the specifics you say sets your novel apart. Indeed, in spite of the fact that these two are apparently the central members of your cast, you have relegated them to less than secondary place on the cover, instead focusing on whoever that central figure is supposed to be.

Rendering those two characters instead of silhouetting them would almost immediately make them the focus of the cover, since the eye would naturally tend to not only go to the center of the cover, but to anything emphasized by the bright blue sphere, the hands and the gaze of the large figure. That would make your characters central to the cover rather than afterthoughts. As things stand now, the eye goes to that area…and there is nothing significant or informative there.

(The “enchanted trees” would be a nice visual element—but they don’t read well in your cover at all. In fact, I only realized they were trees after I read the description and went back and looked.)

By the bye, I would have second thoughts about the placement of that “more epic version” since it would seem to apply to you.