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A Rich Inner Life
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.
Somewhere Else
Alan McKee’s Somewhere Else is a literary speculative novel with the steady pull of psychological horror. Joe Patterson, a sixty-six-year-old history professor, discovers that touching certain artifacts lets him enter the experiences attached to them. He witnesses Jefferson and Franklin shaping the Declaration of Independence, Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon, Van Gogh painting The Starry Night, and the Wright brothers taking flight. These encounters feel intensely physical, complete with smells, emotions, and borrowed memories. They also awaken a dark figure that seems to feed on moments of human transcendence. What begins as a historian’s dream soon develops the rhythm of an addiction, with every extraordinary encounter making Joe’s present life seem a little dimmer.
The historical sequences are the book’s showpieces, and McKee writes them with warmth and sensory detail. His version of Van Gogh experiences color as sound and feeling, while Edison’s successful light bulb matters because it will allow an imagined child to finish reading after dark. These scenes reveal the novel’s generous view of achievement: history is made by vulnerable people who don’t yet know how their work will endure. McKee occasionally repeats phrases about consciousness, infinity, and transcendence more often than their meaning requires, but the recurring language also reflects Joe’s narrowing mind. His intellectual curiosity gradually hardens into a private creed, one that can justify each new deception and disappearance.
The novel becomes especially affecting when it returns to Margaret, Joe’s wife of forty-five years. Her chapters give ordinary life its own weight through coffee, paintings, family dinners, missed calls, and the familiar sounds of another person moving through the house. She understands Joe’s behavior as a wife watching a husband become less honest, less reachable, and less interested in the life they built. That perspective keeps the supernatural plot emotionally credible. Joe’s transformation isn’t treated as a simple fall from grace. He recognizes the value of Margaret, their son, and their granddaughter, then knowingly chooses something else. The ending lands because it preserves that uncomfortable truth, while the epilogue follows Margaret toward a hard-earned freedom from carrying his choice forever.
Readers of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 will recognize the fascination with entering history and the conflict between a monumental mission and an intimate human life. Both books treat the past as a seductive place that can rearrange a person’s loyalties, though McKee approaches that idea through concentrated visions. His strongest contribution is the question beneath Joe’s obsession: if transcendence asks us to surrender the relationships that make us human, what exactly have we transcended? Somewhere Else answers through Margaret’s paintings and memories, finding vast meaning inside finite moments. It’s a haunting first novel about history, compulsion, and the danger of valuing cosmic significance more than the person sitting beside you at breakfast.
Pages: 177 | ASIN : B0HCDR75Q2
The Amplified Entrepreneur
The Amplified Entrepreneur blends personal memoir, music history, and practical business advice into a surprisingly heartfelt guide for entrepreneurs. The book ties rock legends like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and America to lessons about innovation, resilience, and creative courage. It follows the author through childhood moments in a musical home, early experiences in small family businesses, and his evolution into a serial entrepreneur who sees business as something closer to a jam session than a corporate exercise. The book moves through themes of self-doubt, creativity, opportunity, collaboration, reinvention, and promotion, with stories that stretch from basement guitar nights to the pressures of building companies in healthcare and technology.
As I read, I found myself caught off guard by how personal the writing felt. The stories are warm and vivid. The author talks about pumping gas at eight years old and hearing Beatles records that cracked his world open. Those moments made the business lessons earned and authentic rather than like a lecture. The writing feels like someone telling stories over coffee and letting memories tumble out. I actually liked that. It gave the book a human texture. Still, there were moments when I wished the ideas were tightened just a touch, because the storytelling is so strong that the transitions occasionally drift. Even so, I appreciated how consistently he circles back to the real message. Innovation is messy. Growth is personal. Doubt is normal. And nothing in business works without heart.
What surprised me most was how often the book stirred up my own emotions about taking risks. The chapter about embracing failure resonated with me. I could feel the honesty behind the author’s admission that he avoided things for fear of looking foolish. I’ve been there more times than I care to admit. And his stories about forming a band later in life or acting in indie films made me grin because they reminded me that trying new things can be joyful even when we’re terrible at them. His enthusiasm is contagious. I also liked how he uses music as a lens to talk about teamwork, experimentation, and seizing opportunity. It’s unusual and kind of charming, and it kept the book from feeling like every other business guide out there.
The Amplified Entrepreneur brought me a mix of inspiration, nostalgia, and a surprising sense of comfort. I’d recommend it to entrepreneurs who enjoy story-driven guidance rather than rigid frameworks, and to anyone who wants business advice that feels relatable and a little playful. It’s also a great fit for readers who love music and don’t mind their lessons wrapped in lyrics, memories, and the occasional backstage moment.
Pages: 142 | ASIN : B0F4FX3R13
