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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
A Healthy Release
Poems For the Military Veteran, the American Worker, and the American Spirit celebrates the veterans, workers, families, freedoms, and everyday acts of perseverance that you see as the foundation of American character and life. What inspires you to write poetry?
My feelings about life tend to be deep, intense, and raw. Poetry allows me to express what I’m feeling openly and honestly. When I’ve gone through difficult trials and encountered frustrating situations, writing poetry is a healthy release so the feelings aren’t repressed or ignored.
How have your own experiences shaped the way you write about veterans, service, sacrifice, and returning home?
My writing is shaped by listening and showing empathy. I’ve had the honor to teach second and third graders at a base school, and I’ve heard and seen children weep when their parent is deployed and the burdens military families carry emotionally and financially can be very stressful. My poetry is an effort to translate that listening in a way that honors their sacrifice without claiming it as my own.
Why was it important to you to spotlight such a wide range of professions, from farmers and teachers to plumbers, firefighters, and rideshare drivers?
I chose to spotlight a wide range of professions because I believe all work provides a valuable service, and if that work is done honorably and with all your heart, it should be recognized. We’re created with different gifts and unique abilities, and the work we perform should demonstrate those gifts and abilities to the fullest.
You use direct forms such as limericks and acrostics throughout the book. What draws you to these styles of poetry?
I chose to focus on limericks and acrostics because they are creative ways to express humor and wit about friends and subjects that matter to me. Limericks and acrostics have been very enjoyable in my teaching, and I have found that younger children are willing to take more risks in writing using these two-poetry genre.
Author Links: GoodReads | Amazon
Personal Baggage
Bones of Black Saints follows two civil rights attorneys defending a young Black activist accused of shooting a white police officer while confronting racial injustice, police solidarity, and competing versions of truth in Durham, North Carolina. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I represented a young man named Carlos Riley in Durham. Bones of Black Saints is a fictionalized take on his trial.
How did you develop Zenko’s mixture of anxiety, humor, faith, intelligence, and self-doubt?
I wanted a passionate, committed trial attorney who struggled with mental health issues.
Why was it important to portray accomplished attorneys who also struggle with mental health?
I’ve grappled with my own mental health demons. Realistically presenting these issues was a goal of mine in this and in the series of other books, such as The Girl Wore a Hockey Helmet. We trial attorneys bring our personal baggage into the courtroom as much as we try to keep it out. Substance abuse, alcoholism, and depression disproportionately affect lawyers. That’s the reality. One of my clients was sent to Death Row in N.C. because he had a drunk trial attorney. After almost thirty years, the Governor commuted his sentence to life without parole.
What responsibility do you think fiction has when engaging with painful historical events?
Fiction can help us learn and make sense of racial injustice and prosecutorial misconduct. As a writer, I feel a responsibility to confront injustices of the past. That is the first step in combating such inequities in the future.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Bones of Black Saints
Alex Charns’s Bones of Black Saints is a legal thriller and courtroom drama rooted in the politics, history, and racial tensions of Durham, North Carolina. The case centers on Marcos Salazar, a young Black Lives Matter activist accused of shooting a white police officer during a traffic stop. His defense rests with veteran civil rights attorneys Star Gwiazda and Zenko Luczek, who believe the officer shot himself and that the police department has closed ranks around him. From jury selection through closing arguments, the novel turns legal procedure into a contest over whose version of reality will survive.
Zenko’s first-person narration gives this crime novel its distinct personality. He’s anxious, funny, devoutly Catholic, obsessed with hockey, and deeply shaped by his Polish family’s experiences during World War II. His thoughts move freely among the trial, the Black Madonna of Czestochowa, the Greensboro Massacre, old wounds, and elaborate hockey metaphors. Those digressions make the story feel intimate and politically alert, though I did feel that their frequency can slow the courtroom suspense at times. They also reveal how history lives inside Zenko’s daily choices, especially his determination to recognize fascism and institutional abuse before they’re allowed to hide behind respectable appearances.
The courtroom scenes are the strongest part of this police corruption thriller. Charns, a civil rights attorney, writes with a practitioner’s command of motions, evidence, jury selection, witness preparation, and cross-examination. Star is especially memorable, confronting hostile witnesses and prosecutorial misconduct with theatrical nerve and sharp legal instincts. Her relationship with Zenko brings humor and affection to proceedings charged with danger. Their shared mental health histories add further depth, showing two capable advocates who rely on medication, routines, friendship, faith, and hockey to remain steady under extraordinary pressure.
As social justice fiction, Bones of Black Saints connects one contested traffic stop to racial profiling, white supremacy, economic inequality, police solidarity, and the limits of courtroom justice. Its humor keeps the political argument lively, while its detailed trial strategy makes the eventual verdict feel earned. The final development lands with particular force because it exposes acquittal as one moment in a much longer struggle. This is an impassioned legal thriller about lawyers fighting for a client while wrestling with their own histories, blind spots, fears, and stubborn faith in justice. I recommend Charns’s novel to readers who enjoy thought-provoking legal thrillers that explore racial injustice and the complex pursuit of justice.
Pages: 419 | ASIN : B08F75MNK2
A Black Magic
Joseph Stone’s A Black Magic is an expansive work of historical dark fantasy that combines Gothic horror, a multigenerational family saga, and a coming-of-age story. Set primarily in 1974, the novel follows Fran and Mary Jane as they investigate Daedrian, the possessive spirit bound to Fran’s maternal bloodline. Their research leads into the memories of Máirín and Violet Ralston, two eighteenth-century women whose encounters with violence and witchcraft shaped the family’s inheritance. Stone develops the supernatural system through three linked forces, blood, intention, and spiritual light, giving the mystery both emotional significance and coherent internal rules.
The relationship between Fran and Mary Jane provides the novel’s strongest foundation. Their handwritten exchanges combine analytical discipline, mordant humor, and profound loyalty, allowing them to investigate experiences that can scarcely be discussed aloud. The line “You will be the grief. I will be the clock” captures how effectively their contrasting temperaments work together. Fran possesses the inherited power and bears its physical cost, while Mary Jane supplies structure, skepticism, and strategy. Their gradual shift from frightened researchers to deliberate adversaries gives the narrative a satisfying sense of intellectual and moral progression.
Stone also places the supernatural conflict within a richly developed family drama. Laura’s struggle with widowhood, Richie’s experience as a gay teenager in a volatile Catholic household, and Carla’s attempt to rebuild a life after abuse broaden the novel’s consideration of secrecy and survival. These storylines show how domination can pass through families without magic, while acts of recognition can interrupt that inheritance. The novel treats sexual violence directly and at considerable length, but its deeper concern is the aftermath: how survivors interpret memory, recover agency, and decide which truths can safely be shared. As Fran observes, “The truth was a house with no doors,” a metaphor that aptly expresses the burden carried by nearly every major character.
A Black Magic has the scale and patience of a family chronicle. Its alternating timelines steadily clarify Daedrian’s history, Máirín’s tragedy, and the flawed act of witchcraft that binds them all together. Stone’s prose is atmospheric and frequently lyrical, particularly in its descriptions of houses, weather, grief, and unseen attention, though the density of figurative language occasionally slows scenes that already carry substantial dramatic weight. The conclusion rewards the novel’s long preparation by resolving its central conflict through character, knowledge, and sacrifice, then extending its consequences across fifty years. The result is a thoughtful, unsettling novel about inherited harm, the ethics of power, and the difficult work of seeing another person clearly.
Pages: 561 | ASIN : B0HJ78S7BS
Jack & Will
D.E. Ring’s Jack & Will, the fourth volume in The Scandalous Memoirs of General John Torrance, is a historical espionage novel set amid the European partition of East Africa. Narrated by the older Jack Torrance as a record of his intelligence work in the 1880s, the novel begins with his escape from the fallen city of Khartoum and follows him into Zanzibar, the German and British competition for influence, and the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition. Its extensive cast includes diplomats, monarchs, soldiers, merchants, missionaries, and spies, many drawn from history. Jack moves among them as an observer, interpreter, servant, and occasional strategist, giving the political contest an immediate human perspective.
The memoir form suits Jack’s candid, dryly humorous voice. He’s perceptive about vanity and institutional failure, but his self-awareness prevents his judgments from becoming merely cynical. Ring combines political conversation with scenes of physical danger, from a cyclone in the Indian Ocean to the concluding operation at Pangani. The dialogue is especially effective at revealing how governments and commercial interests convert ambition into policy. Historical exposition is substantial, and the middle portion sometimes advances through long conversations, but those exchanges establish the competing motives behind the action and make the eventual violence feel consequential.
At the book’s center is the moral cost of imperial expansion. Treaties are written in languages local rulers can’t read, commerce provides the rationale for occupation, and public narratives turn failure into heroism. Ring also gives meaningful attention to Africans who understand the political transformation around them, including Pera Dandji, Tippu Tib, Nuru, and Hasani. Tippu Tib’s observation, “Our world is over. We play this game for ourselves alone,” captures the novel’s sense of people adapting to decisions imposed from elsewhere. Jack’s friendship with the German intelligence officer Wilfried Tapken adds another dimension: they remain loyal to their countries while recognizing that facts, restraint, and personal trust can matter more than national posturing.
The title gathers several relationships around Jack, particularly those involving Prince Wilhelm, Wilfried Tapken, and William Stairs. Each man represents a different response to power and experience. Stairs provides the most affecting thread, returning from the jungle hardened, bereaved, and estranged from the hopeful young cadet Jack once knew. Jack’s description of his own moral compass, “The ten-year-old Jack. The best I ever was,” gives their reunion its emotional weight. Jack & Will is an intelligent, humane historical adventure whose wit, political detail, and reflective first-person voice support a serious examination of loyalty, identity, and the stories nations tell about conquest.
Pages: 293 | ASIN : B0H6KHFPBN
