Brent Hartinger Books in Order

If you want the series that started it all: Geography Club → The Order of the Poison Oak → Split Screen: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies / Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies.
If you want Russel as a young adult: The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know → Barefoot in the City of Broken Dreams → The Road to Amazing.
If you want Otto in the spotlight: The Otto Digmore Difference → The Otto Digmore Decision.
If you want stand-alone suspense: Three Truths and a Lie → Grand & Humble → Infinite Drift.

Brent Hartinger grew up in Tacoma, Washington, and that Pacific Northwest mix of wit, restlessness, and outsider energy still runs through a lot of his work. He studied at Gonzaga University in Spokane, later did graduate work in psychology at Western Washington University, and spent years trying to build a creative life that could hold all the things he cared about, books, theater, film, and the strange business of telling the truth through fiction.

Writing won.

After college, he decided to take novels and screenplays seriously. It was not a quick success story. He wrote book after book, piled up unpublished manuscripts, and kept going through rejection after rejection until Geography Club finally sold and was published in 2003. That novel, about gay teenager Russel Middlebrook and the secret school group he helps form, became the breakthrough that put Hartinger on the map.

The success of Geography Club led to a whole connected story world. Hartinger followed Russel through The Order of the Poison Oak, the inventive dual novel Split Screen: Attack of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies / Bride of the Soul-Sucking Brain Zombies, and later the adult follow-up books that begin with The Thing I Didn't Know I Didn't Know. Readers often come for the humor and fast pace, then stay for the friendships, awkward honesty, and the sense that being queer is part of life, not the only thing in it.

He never stayed in one lane, though. The Last Chance Texaco looks at group-home life through a mystery plot. Grand & Humble and Three Truths and a Lie lean into psychological suspense. Project Sweet Life and its later reissue Project Pay Day show his lighter, comic-adventure side, while Shadow Walkers and Infinite Drift push into paranormal and science fiction territory. Even when the genre changes, his books tend to keep the same pull, smart outsiders, emotional honesty, and stories that move.

Because Geography Club was challenged in schools and libraries, Hartinger also became part of larger conversations about censorship and who gets to see themselves on the shelf. That fits naturally with the work itself. His fiction has always made room for queer teens and young adults as full people, messy, funny, romantic, frightened, hopeful, and not reduced to a lesson.

He likes a strong hook.

Hartinger has also worked as a playwright and screenwriter, and that movie-minded energy is easy to spot in his fiction. Geography Club was adapted into a feature film in 2013, and Project Pay Day was adapted into a feature film in 2021 from his own screenplay. He has taught creative writing at Vermont College, co-founded AfterElton in 2004, and, much earlier, helped start one of the country's first LGBTQ youth support groups in Tacoma in 1990. His work has also earned honors including Lambda and GLAAD awards, the Scandiuzzi Children's Book Award, and an Edgar Award nomination.

A lot of Hartinger's fiction circles the same big questions from different angles. How do you figure out who you are when the world keeps handing you a bad script? What happens after the big coming-out moment, when real life keeps going? He returns again and again to close friendships, chosen family, creative ambition, queer identity, and people who feel a little out of step with whatever room they have wandered into.

These days, he continues to write while traveling the world with his husband, writer Michael Jensen, without a permanent home base. That suits his books more than you might expect. His characters are often in motion too, crossing campgrounds, movie sets, hidden tunnels, city apartments, and whole emotional eras while trying to find a place, and a life, that feels like their own.