Atlas
The Realm
Upperlands and Lowlands, sealed between the Forest of the North and the Forest of the South. Touch a red mark.
The last human was hunted to extinction in the year of Man 2067. The vampires sealed themselves off from the rest of the world, learned to live on blood berries, and called it the Day That Death Was Born.
It is now 1089 A.D.W.B. The Realm runs on Rules, Specialties and a High Council. Every hundred and twenty-one years a motorbike race decides who will be King of the Undead — and a bookish Fledgling from Brimberg who rides a bicycle everywhere is about to build himself a motorbike.
Upperlands and Lowlands, sealed between the Forest of the North and the Forest of the South. Touch a red mark.
The songs came first. Each one is written into the book at the scene it plays under. Here they are in story order.
High Council slogans, Pike’s Run bills, tavern signs and the posters the High Council would rather you didn’t see.
The Pike’s Run is open to any male vampire between fifty and two hundred and fifty years old. Sixteen weeks of qualifying runs take the field from twelve hundred Riders down to two. The winner is named King of the Undead.
In eleven centuries, a Von Firstenstein has won every Pike’s Run. And in every one, only one Rider has ever come back.
Persons of interest, Ninth Pike’s Run season.
Every chapter of the book opens with a plate.
“What if having an incredible moment could be worth more than a thousand years of life?”
Forty chapters, two maps, and the posters, paintings and plates from this site, with the songs cued to the scenes they play under.
Rise of the Cafe Racer was Deano Jones’s first novel. It grew out of a rock opera he wrote and recorded in Austin in 2012, and the album of songs that goes with it.
In the 90s he fronted the New York theatrical punk band Clowns for Progress. He has worked as a graphic designer most of his life.
Since then he has written and illustrated three books about Feral Frank, a feral goat he and his wife Sarah rescued: No Fence Can Hold Him, Feral Frank Goes to Work and Feral Frank Saves Christmas.
He lives on a 22-acre wildlife habitat east of Austin, Texas, where he spends his time writing, playing music and tending to Frank.
