Thorsten the Rood, a 1300-year-old Viking warrior-poet, stops aging at 44, secretly living on over the centuries, behind the identities of some of the world’s best-known writers. Learning of the secret Viking’s extended existence, Professor August Dallou resolves to track down Thorsten and mine his vast trove of historical information. And so, scholar turns sleuth to hunt the elusive Viking. The ongoing, often mind-blowing puzzle takes a seriously droll look at literature, perpetrated while under the influence of Kafka, Joyce, Eliot, Barthelme, Nabokov, and Borges.

For the cover design of the first volume, The Secret Viking, the striking graphic quality of the black silhouette against the blue background brings a contemporary rendition of vintage covers for detective novels. The rendering of the horns brings about a whimsical flavor suggestive of the subversive and wickedly funny aspects in the book juxtaposed with the preposterous dark glasses.

For the second volume, The Return of the Secret Viking, the author requested a rendition of the first cover design that would not suggest historical fiction – less of a warrior and more of a modern writer. As such, our cover cooks created a new illustration suggestive of a detective or contemporary multi-genre story, using a book as a mask that symbolizes the identities of writers whom Thorsten the Rood hides behind to cover his tracks.