Somewhere Else follows a history professor who experiences the past through artifacts, becoming addicted to these encounters while awakening a sinister force. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?

Honestly, it came out of my own classroom. I’ve spent years teaching history, and the thing I always try to get students to do is feel their way into a moment, not just memorize dates. There’s actually a term for that: temporal empathy. One day I found myself thinking, what if that wasn’t just a mental exercise? What if the right object, in the right hands, could actually pull someone back into the moment it came from? I was also chewing on Einstein’s block universe theory, the idea that the past isn’t really gone; it’s still out there, somewhere else. Put those two things together, and you get Joe: a man whose gift for empathizing with history becomes a door he can’t stop walking through. And once you have a door like that, it’s not much of a stretch to wonder what dark forces might be waiting on the other side.

Why was it important that Joe knowingly makes choices that hurt the people closest to him?

Because I didn’t want to let him off the hook, and I didn’t want readers to either. Joe isn’t sleepwalking into this. He knows what it’s costing him with Margaret and with his own life, and he does it anyway. That’s what addiction actually looks like most of the time; it’s not blindness, it’s a kind of willful looking away. There’s also an irony I kept coming back to while writing: Joe has this huge well of empathy for people who have been dead for centuries, soldiers at Valley Forge, an artist in his final days, and almost none left over for the people sitting across the table from him. That gap felt like the real heart of the book.

How did you decide where historical fact should end, and imagination should begin?

I tried to be upfront about that instead of blurring it, which is part of why I wrote an Author’s Note that gets into it directly. The physics is real; the block universe theory is a genuine, debated idea in modern physics, not something I made up to make the plot work. Temporal empathy as a term is real too; it’s how historians talk about teaching people to feel the past rather than just study it. What I invented is the jump from those two real ideas to a person physically stepping into history. I also use a metaphor, a hallway of doors, when I explain the concept in interviews or marketing copy. That’s purely explanatory; it doesn’t literally appear anywhere in the book. My rule was simple: ground the premise in something true enough that readers trust it, then take the one leap the science itself will not take.

What do you hope readers take away from Joe and Margaret’s very different relationships with time?

Joe treats time like something to enter and collect, one door after another. Margaret is a visual artist, and she’s rooted in the present in a way Joe has completely lost; she’s making things with her hands while he’s disappearing into the past. I wanted that contrast to sit with readers a little uncomfortably. Is a rich inner life spent somewhere else worth more than actually being present in the life you already have? I purposely don’t answer that cleanly, and the ending won’t let you off easy either. But if someone closes the book thinking harder about where their own attention lives, that’s really all I was hoping for.

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At sixty-six, history professor Joe Patterson discovers he can touch an artifact and step inside the moment it came from: Valley Forge, the fevered hours in Van Gogh’s room at Arles, the cramped cabin of Apollo 11 as it broke from Earth’s orbit. It feels like a miracle. It’s a trap.

The visions escalate, and the hunger for them becomes its own kind of addiction, one that costs Joe his marriage, his son’s trust, and, piece by piece, his grip on which century he’s actually standing in. Something on the other side of history has been feeding on minds like his for a very long time; it isn’t finished with Joe yet.

Somewhere Else is a literary novel with a horror pulse: a story about obsession, erasure, and the price of touching the past.