Photo of Allen Longstreet.
Underbelly (2026) Overview
Underbelly is a page turning dystopian thriller set in 2044. Think Promised Neverland and Eyes Wide Shut if those two stories came together and created a world we all lived in.
The story follows a 17 year old boy named Hiro Hara, who has been missing for 10 years. Once he makes it back to his family in California they discover Hiro has no recollection of anything prior to the ride he caught leaving Nevada in the rearview. His older brother Yuta has a mission and a dark side. Wanting to seek justice for his brother’s stolen childhood, he spends countless late nights out rubbing elbows with the elites of Los Angeles.
His gut tells him there’s a cabal of wealthy men who kidnap children. Why? He has a theory. One night Yuta meets the man that will help him discover that his theory was nothing compared to the actual story. The men that run the mega-conglomerate O-Corp, aren’t men, they’re monsters and revenge is all Yuta can see.
What I enjoyed about Underbelly was that it was filled with grounded characters and very descriptive settings. The story itself was dark, thought provoking, and kept you turning the page. The author grabs your attention straight out the gate, then turns around and breaks your heart within the first couple of chapters. This only locks the reader in and lets them know that they are in for an emotional ride. It’s a dystopian thriller that doesn’t rely on broody characters, neon lights, or rain-covered streets. It’s sunny, it’s LA evenings as a backdrop for debauchery, and it’s small desert mining towns just trying to exist in the O-Corp chokehold.
Technology is not just a part of life, it’s how one exists and navigates in the world. As a reader I felt that the story really shines a light on how technology can control a society with surveillance disguised as convenience or safety. It also showed how those who have everything want more for themselves while seeing those beneath them as tools to gain anything their heart desires. How the powerful crave youth to extend their lives while draining the lives of others. Meanwhile, those who have little, so much less than their Elite counterparts, are willing to give it all. They would rather die for a cause and sacrifice themselves to help and save others.
Considering the politics that are playing out right before our eyes on the world stage–not just in the U.S.–this story feels especially relevant. The book shows that there is some truth to rumors and that not all conspiracy theories are just theories. Allen Longstreet had some great conspiracy theory hunches over 3 years ago when he started writing Hiro’s story at the front desk of a small boutique hotel in Venice Beach, CA.
I enjoyed Underbelly so much, I had decided I wanted to speak with the author. Please enjoy our conversation and note that this interview contains some spoilers. Here is an extended video version of the interview on YouTube linked:
SPOLIERS AHEAD
Interview with Allen Longstreet
Angela Amador: Hi, how are you doing?
Allen Longstreet: I’m good, Angela, thanks so much for having me.
Angela Amador: Of course, thank you so much for allowing me to be one of your advanced readers for Underbelly.
This book, (Underbelly) you got to write it a lot quicker than you normally would, due to the kind of job that you had at the time. Everyone wants to know how that happens, like, how the process is, but I was interested in that particularly.
Allen Longstreet: Yeah, so I was working in 2022, for about 6 to 7 months, I was working for a tech startup. I was only there for a little bit, and then I was unfortunately a part of a layoff. I saw an advertisement for this little boutique hotel in Venice Beach, California, that was looking for a part-time night auditor.
I think I started a few days before New Year’s, going in from 2022 into 2023, and I work on Saturday and Sunday 10:45pm – 7 a.m. There were only 35 rooms. I had an 8-hour shift, and I literally would do an hour to an hour and a half’s worth of work. Sometimes I would get a straggler, a late check-in that would come in at midnight or 1AM or something, and then someone leaving early in the morning.
We had a security guard who would come around the same time I arrived, and he would sit in his car in the parking lot. I could walkie him and say, hey, you know, I need help with something. But it was very calm, very quiet, and I was really able to churn out the bulk of Underbelly at that front desk. It was just this quiet focus time where I could just sip coffee, imagine these scenarios and just the story that unfolded with Underbelly. So, yeah, I wrote it in about nine and a half, ten months. I finished it in July of 2023, after I had left that job.
So, yeah. I really appreciate you asking that question. That’s such an interesting one.
Angela Amador: My next question: why the desert location? I live in the desert, and all the plants there are trying to fight you. It is not a nice place to be. Super dry. So, why did you pick that specific location?
Allen Longstreet: It’s a really great question, and I’m really happy to be able to answer it for the very first time, and I’m hoping down the road that I get to either do some kind of book talk or something. I chose the desert, and specifically Nevada, because in my research, I was thinking to myself. What’s going on in the community? What’s happening in that world?
I kind of fell down this rabbit hole of lithium mining. In my research, I’m discovering that all of these old abandoned mining towns, a lot in Nevada, California, and Arizona are going to experience (not necessarily a boom) but they’re going to have more transient workers and people, transplants, living there, to work those jobs. The mine that I referenced, in the scene with Jim, (the Rhyolite Ridge mine) that’s under contract. The government has basically said, from 2027 onward, we’re going to build out this gigantic lithium mine (in the process right now.) That’s a piece of truth that I inserted into fiction. Lithium mining is going to explode.
Allen Longstreet: What I’m getting at, why I put the UMBRA there, is honestly, Angela, I had the thought if there really was some kind of facility like this. If you were some kind of elite that was trying to keep something like this under wraps, my thought was that, I know it seems far-fetched. But if it were underneath some sort of functional business, like a working mine processing plant (lithium) if it was deep beneath one of these facilities, no one really knew and if there was some sort of event, or some sort of breach, (like the president hitting the red button.)We need to erase all the evidence that this thing ever existed. T
he way that my brain works, as a writer, I thought to myself, you could literally just make the whole mine explode. Like, you can make it look like some terrible mine disaster, and then it covers the evidence of what really, you know, was beneath there. I love spinning my wheels with things like that.
Angela Amador: Yeah.
Allen Longstreet: That’s why I was in the desert, that’s why the UMBRA is in Nevada, specifically in Goldfield, because there’s a huge mining project that is about to go underway there in the next decade.
Angela Amador: I do have a question about a particular paragraph that really stuck to me. There’s a character named Sue. She talks about how the media puts a very sour feeling in her stomach due to the insidious placements of it.(the media)That particular paragraph that you wrote, what is it that is in our present day(media)that may have inspired that particular sour stomach feeling that your character had?
Allen Longstreet: Oh, Angela. Great question. Depending on their own beliefs, they might come to you with different answers. In terms of just propaganda depending on what side of the political aisle you’re on, I feel like both sides have their own forms of propaganda. You might not have a nuanced opinion. And on the same token, I’m the first person to say, I really don’t like the double standard that I think exists today. If you are someone where the only thing you listen to is CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and you don’t listen to, you know, anything that is not in that sphere, or you question authority, you’re basically whatever label someone wants to put on it.
It doesn’t foster thought, it doesn’t foster nuance. I feel like, as you see Sue’s arc through the story, you realize why she has thoughts about the propaganda and the old world versus the new, because she’s in her 50s. I believe that she brings it up because she partly misses the way things were when she was a child. Also, she feels guilty. She feels guilty, because as you read the story, I think you realize that Sue herself is a little more tied to this new system, politically.
Angela Amador: I liked her little story. It(Sue)was also bringing it back, because you get so wrapped up in Yuta’s story. Because that’s all gas, no brakes. That man is just, like, he’s getting it. So, it’s nice to come back, she kind of reminds you of the world that we’re in.
That it’s not Yuta’s version, what he’s experiencing is something that the whole entire world doesn’t experience, but with her, it’s a lot more like, this is where we’re at. So she brings you back in, and then you remember the task at hand.
Angela Amador: I felt that you explained a lot of the technology, to a baseline to where anyone can kind of understand what it does. And I wanted to understand, you obviously work in IT, but what is the amount of research you do when you write your books?
Allen Longstreet: To try to put it simply, I have a process where before I start a new book. I have to have an idea that burns very bright. But the research side of it, I always start with characters first. I try to not necessarily plot everything out right away, but I try to think of, like, who are we gonna be with? Who is our cast?
And so, I did this for Underbelly. It was like pen and paper, all handwritten I don’t do anything on my computer or writing device until I get all this done, which is the character back work. I might not know everything, if I know 60-80%, I can just make it up on the fly.
I always want to have my fiction grounded in some kind of fact, in some kind of truth. So, when I wrote this in 2022 and 2023, a lot of the stuff that I wrote about, I thought was just a conspiratorial hunch. You can find there’s a very good investigative journalism article on The Guardian, and it was written back in, like, 2016 or 2017, where allegedly.
Peter Thiel was spending $40,000 a quarter on this young blood plasma transfer, where and it was literally, like, $8,000 to $10,000 of treatment, and they were shut down by the FDA, and allegedly, again, I’m saying allegedly here, because who knows who’s gonna see this interview. But allegedly, they were shut down by the FDA, not once, but twice. They tried to restart somewhere else. They were taking healthy donors from their late teens to early 20. They were taking their plasma as donations, and people could pay who were older to have these infusions.
As a writer, and it’s really sad that I thought this way, but I had a kind of really dark thought. If there’s anybody writing about this in The Guardian, if this actually happened, and this is what we can read about in an article. Then, for the elites of the world, what if there are people who are unwilling donors? What if there are people who are under 18 that maybe that blood or that plasma is stronger, or more invigorating, or whatever, than what we see on the surface?
Angela Amador: That is true.
I actually did appreciate a few things that you did differently. It’s a dystopian book. There’s a thing that you did that I really appreciated, I haven’t read anything like this before, and I thought it was extremely clever and very smart, and I really want to know your train of thought on this.
Allen Longstreet: Sure.
Angela Amador: I think chapter 16. E is having a thought process, and he says, do you mind if I read the paragraph?
Allen Longstreet: Absolutely, go for it.
Angela Amador: “We can feed them, clothe them, and ensure them healthy. But they do not have hope they weather like a flower with no sun. So that’s why we give them books. It’s the only way they will know something better exists beyond the UMBRA.”
So, in most dystopian books, they take the books away. They take the knowledge. You weaponized it on these children.
Allen Longstreet: Yeah, I’m getting chills when you said it, because, like.
Angela Amador: When I read that, I got chills, so I was like, oh my God. No one’s ever done that. It’s always take, take, take, but they’re like, no, we’re gonna give you this and it’s gonna hurt you more.
How did we get there?
Allen Longstreet: It’s exactly as you said. You hit the nail on the head, and it’s the fact that for the children that have been brought down there, you realize by the end of the story that all of the children have broken and missing pieces.
Hiro, bold-faced, confidently says at the very beginning of the book that “Lyla and I are special. We have all of our memories, we are children 001 and 002. We are the first.” That’s not true. But in regards to the books and how it’s weaponized. I agree, and it was really hearing you say it, it gave me chills, but when I originally wrote it, I intended it to be, like you said, it’s a weapon.
It’s the fact that it keeps the children just strong enough to keep going. It’s like dangling a carrot over the children’s head of, you’re stuck here, but we’re gonna give you just enough books to read about what exists, to read about the world that’s been partially deleted from your mind, whether certain memories were wiped, or whole scenes of your life were wiped, you know, with Elina’s formulas and stuff like that. But yeah, yeah, it’s 100% a weapon.
I appreciate you bringing up that paragraph, because it’s one of my favorites in the book.
Angela Amador: So, music. There are two specific pieces that you do pick for that are in the UMBRA. Can you explain why music is so important to that specific part of the book?
Allen Longstreet: Well, for the scenes that you have towards the end, where the Vivaldi’s Four Seasons are played.
Angela Amador: Yes.
*SPOILER*
Allen Longstreet: There’s a conversation with Elina and Dr. Nuogu in a certain point in the book, where they are realizing that for the children who have had deleted memories, or parts of them that are not there, or those memories that are suppressed and maybe not completely gone. The memories have been suppressed, when certain music and certain frequencies are played. The nanoparticles, or whatever’s in Elina’s formulas that help suppress memories that aren’t deleted, but are still there, but they’re suppressed by the brain, or in the brain, that frequency is starting to kind of shake things loose that shouldn’t be shaken.
I actually listened to those pieces when I was writing those scenes in the UMBRA towards the end of the book. I was listening to Vivaldi, and part of me hopes that some reader might just say, you know what, I’m gonna just put this on my headphones while I read these, you know.
Angela Amador: I did.
Okay, last question, I think it’s the perfect way to wrap it up. Once you are done with the book, the last page is done, it’s off to edit. Which character was the easiest for you to say goodbye to, and which one kind of still lingered past that process?
Allen Longstreet: That’s tough. I would say the easiest to say goodbye to was Ren, although it was sad. (You know what happens.)
Angela Amador: Alright.
Allen Longstreet: Ren, it’s like, I almost felt like when you’re watching the movie Titanic, and the captain goes into his room by the helm, and it’s filling up with water. He’s just kind of at peace with his fate.
Angela Amador: Yeah.
Allen Longstreet: So, easiest to say goodbye to him, and I would say the hardest to say goodbye to was probably Hiro. I feel like the bulk of the story is almost Yuta’s. I always have a soft spot for Hiro, because I feel like he was almost a passenger in his own story, and partly, I think that’s because of the memory loss.
Even when I was writing him, there were moments, and I was telling this to my good friend, I was like, there were times when I was writing Hero where I felt like he was younger than 17, and I’m like, wait, am I writing him wrong? Am I writing him where he seems like a child? But then I realized, you know what? If your memory was totally wiped, and you were learning the world from scratch again.
You are like maybe you act and feel 15 or 14 when your body’s really 17. There’s my answer, and thank you so much for taking the time to talk.
Angela Amador: Thank you so much.
Allen Longstreet: I do want to announce I have decided to donate 100% of my author royalties to the Tim Tebow Foundation through the end of 2026, so if anyone buys an e-book, a physical copy, what I earn on the book is going to go to charity.
Thanks, Angela, it was great talking to you. Take care.
Angela Amador: You too.
Allen Longstreet is an American author. He was raised in Hickory, North Carolina and studied Journalism and Film Production at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His fiction often arises from vivid dreams, but what inspires him in the waking world is exploring the rawness of human loss, attempting to answer the age-old question of whether blood is thicker than water, and spinning up dystopian societies that feel just a little too close to our own.
Allen doesn’t believe in put-a-bow-on-it endings or easy heroes. He writes to disturb, to move, and to reach the parts of us we often keep buried. He lives in Florida.