When AJ Hartley was a professor in UNC Charlotte’s Theatre Department, I used to see him on campus on a regular basis. On the occasions when we ran into each other, I always asked him about his latest book projects, and he always had news to share. However, since his retirement in 2023, we have not had as many chance-encounters. In an effort to get caught up with his latest writing projects, I reached out to him and asked him if he had any new books. Here is what he sent to me:
I published two novels last year. They are wildly different from each other in genre, style and content. One is a sci-fi thriller titled Time Rider. It’s about a totalitarian future reaching back into the nineteen sixties to counter what it sees as temporal terrorism. It follows a throwback called Bowie, selected because he’ll blend into the US population more seamlessly than some of his masters would, and because he is attempting to cement his relationship with a government which despises him and his kind. He enters the past on a purpose-built motorcycle but quickly proves too susceptible to the culture of the moment and goes rogue. The story, which leaps through key moments of history—particularly the Kennedy assassination—is part of my on-going work with Tom DeLonge of Blink-182 and is informed by Peter Levenda’s Sinister Forces nonfiction trilogy. It’s an action-packed mystery which grows out of the tradition of films like The Terminator and Twelve Monkeys, but it is also a rumination on what it is to be human.
The other book is a continuation of my Hideki Smith series, YA novels about a mixed race Japanese American family (like mine) battling yokai (Japanese supernatural creatures) in their small North Carolina mountain town. The first book, Hideki Smith Demon Queller (shortlisted for the Dragon Award), was released in Japanese last summer as Hideki Smith To Nihon No Yokai. Book 2, Hideki Smith and the Omukade, is a bigger, more adult book, which gives more room for characters like Hideki’s British-born father Stephen, who is (self-evidently) my alter ego. An Omukade, incidentally, is the Japanese monster version of an all too real giant centipede.
I’m working on book 3 in the series now and will be visiting Japan (and my translator) next month for inspiration! Incidentally, since so much of my old YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/@AndrewHartley) was Japan focused, I opted last year to move all my writing-related content to a new channel—AJ Hartley’s weird writing life: www.youtube.com/@ajhartleyauthor. Please subscribe for writing tales and tips.
The Hideki Smith stories are, of course, anchored by my sense of family and the specifics of living in North Carolina as a Brit with a Japanese American wife and son. The adventures are therefore shot through with questions of identity, belonging, and competing notions of Americanness. Since the novels are published by Charlotte based small press Falstaff Books, there’s an enhanced sense of the expressly local, of my embeddedness within a particular community whose sense of self is shifting, expanding. That is important to me and to the stories, as we—and the wider community—wrestle with ideas of who we are as a collective and—perhaps more importantly—who we want to be. Monster stories have always been great metaphors for questions of Otherness, of frightening things from outside our world which shine a light on what’s going on within it, and those questions feel especially urgent just now. I’m proud to work within that narrative tradition and—I hope—give readers some scares and maybe a few laughs along the way.
I congratulate AJ Hartley on the publication of these latest novels. While I miss seeing him on campus, I am pleased that he still an active member of the Storied Charlotte community.