The first book in his new double novel, “The Girl Who Walked Out Of Time”, focuses on 18 year old Lena Carbone, who left her house in Jamestown in 1985 to take a walk in the woods and never came back. 40 years later, on the morning of Oct. 10, the same day she disappeared, Lena returns from the same woods, unchanged, after what she thought was an hour and a half walk, though for everyone else it was a lifetime. Her mother is an old woman. Her friends are grandparents. The town that mourned her has moved on–or thinks it has. The world she knew is gone, replaced by smartphones, streaming, and a thousand unanswered questions.

DNA proves she is who she says she is. Science can’t explain it. The government wants to study her. The town wants a miracle. Lena only wants her life back, something no one can give her.

“I hadn’t done one set in Jamestown before,” Buck said. “I have done one in a fictional version of Bemus Point and a fictional version of Mayville. In this novel, the main character is an 18 year old girl who goes for a walk in the woods in 1985 and comes back out in 2025, still 18 years old after what she thinks is only an hour and a half, and it felt like the right book to have set in Jamestown.”

The setting of the book is also focused on real places, including the Hundred Acre Lot by Jamestown Community College. Buck also included real people in the book, including the 10,000 Maniacs band, as the main character is a punk rocker. Another big focus of this book for him, Buck said, was bringing more of a focus to real life murdered and missing women in the city that have happened multiple times over the years, such as Yolanda Bindics, as he said it is first assumed that the main character is a part of those events. Buck added that he dedicated the book to the families of those missing and murdered women, along with his brother, who was a part of 10,000 Maniacs who passed away.

Local author, TJ Buck recently released a new double novel, with the first novel set in the city of Jamestown. Submitted photo

“I grew up in Jamestown as part of the punk rock scene by JCC and I moved back 16 years ago,” Buck said. “I wanted to honor my hometown but not make it seem like it was a paradise, because there are some things that are not so great.”

Both novels in this book are crime novels with a supernatural element to them. The second novel in the book, “Blackthorne”, is the story of a man who walks into a remote village and sees a woman who looks like his sister that died in a car crash years before that he caused, along with seeing other people that he finds vaguely familiar. Buck said this book has a time travel element to it as well, and that both books have a supernatural twist.

For “The Girl Who Walked Out Of Time”, he said local people should be very interested especially if they grew up in the area at that time, or if they are fans of the 10,000 Maniacs band. Buck added that he is friends with the band’s current guitar player who posted about the book on a fan page for the band, and it has already received a lot of responses from fans of the band.

“The Girl Who Walked Out Of Time” is about loss and memory, for both the main character and the other people in her life that moved on without her, bringing on confusion and different feelings, along with the idea of identity and having a place to belong, as she does not belong in that place anymore.

Buck said he got the idea for the book based on a French TV series called “The Returned”, where several people disappear from a small French town and come back years later the same age. Similarly, “Blackthorne” is based on a German TV show about time travel where people bounce back and forth between timelines and will show up 30 or 40 years earlier. Both books focus on the idea of identity versus place versus time, and include a metaphysical element, Buck said.

Buck’s double novel, “The Girl Who Walked Out Of Time” and “Blackthorne”, is available now.