EJ Altbacker Books in Order

For most readers: Shark Wars → The Battle of Riptide → Into the Abyss
If you want bigger mythology and battles: Into the Abyss → Kingdom of the Deep → Enemy of Oceans
If you're heading for the finale: Enemy of Oceans → The Last Emprex

EJ Altbacker is a screenwriter and author who clearly likes stories with motion. His books and scripts tend to throw characters into trouble early, then keep tightening the screws. A lot of his work is aimed at younger audiences, but he writes with enough clarity and momentum that older readers can see the craft underneath it.

His path into writing did not begin in a straight line. He studied marketing at the University of Notre Dame, then later earned an MFA in screenwriting from the American Film Institute. That shift from business school to story work says a lot about the way he writes now. The ideas may get strange, but the plotting is built to move.

Then television became his training ground.

Altbacker spent years writing for animation and family focused genre shows. His credits include work on Static Shock, Justice League, Spider-Man, and Extreme Ghostbusters, and he later added series such as Ben 10, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, and Spooksville. Those projects asked for pace, teamwork, clean action, and big worldbuilding, all things that also show up in his fiction.

That screen background carries right into his best known books, the six book Shark Wars series. Starting with Shark Wars and continuing through The Battle of Riptide, Into the Abyss, and The Last Emprex, the books follow Gray, a young shark pulled into a much larger fight for the future of the ocean. The setup is unusual, shark clans, old laws, underwater politics, but the storytelling stays easy to follow. Readers who click with these books usually come for the action and stay for the friendships, rivalries, and steadily rising stakes.

He likes underdogs.

That matters because Altbacker's main characters are often outmatched at the start. Gray is uncertain, overhungry, and forced to grow up fast. Even when Altbacker writes comedy, he tends to center people who are in over their heads and have to improvise their way forward. Friendship, loyalty, and learning who to trust are recurring threads, and so is the moment when a young hero realizes no perfect adult is coming to fix everything.

After Shark Wars, he returned to middle grade fiction with Handy Andy Saves the World, a science fiction comedy about a handyman caught up in an alien crisis. It is a very different premise, but the same instincts are there. He likes ordinary people in strange situations, jokes that cut through pressure, and plots that keep clicking forward one problem at a time.

You can also feel the screenwriter in the prose. Scenes are easy to picture. Action is laid out cleanly. Chapters tend to end right where a reader wants one more. That is especially useful in a kids' adventure series, where momentum matters, but it also speaks to his broader style as a storyteller.

Altbacker has continued to work across books, animation, and comics, which fits someone comfortable moving between formats. He lives in the South Bay area of Los Angeles, and he has shared that he likes biking and slow runs by the shore. That last detail feels fitting for the author of Shark Wars. Some writers build whole worlds on land. He was happy to send readers into the deep.