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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
Psychological Growth
Church Shoes centers around a teenager from her mother’s mysterious disappearance after a Sunday church service to her adult career as a lawyer and her ongoing determination to uncover the truth. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
I was born in 1944. My dad was in the Army Air Force overseas in the South Pacific.
My initial impressions of life were from my mom and maternal grandparents, who were Czech immigrants. WWII was the major social, cultural, social, and economic influence in people’s lives. I learned of my grandparents’ lives and my mom’s and dad’s and family relatives’ lives from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s and have always had an interest in those historical periods, as well as my decades during the 50s to the current time.
Many of my novels are inspired by American and European history. The Discontent of Mary Wenger and Paper Dolls are historically related to Church Shoes and draw on people, locations, and events from the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Teens becoming adults living during those periods are an integral foundation for those novels.
Alice Quint conveys the complex emotional caring, psychological growth, and physical and mental fortitude portrayed by all my female protagonists. Each of their stories is a unique personal journey.
I enjoy writing women’s fiction. Women are incredibly amazing people.
They have had an influence on my life since I was born to this day.
My wife and I have been married for 60 years. We are 82 years old and are sorry, but grateful, that we and others have A Limited Time Only, the title of my 27th novel.
The idea behind Church Shoes comes from those influences and my own experiences growing up in the 40s and 50s in the rural and urban Middle West.
The prevalence of the Nazi German American Bund during the 30s and 40s created the dramatic conflicts Alice and her family encountered and the ironic lifelong friendship she developed with a Mafioso’s daughter, a girl and her family I once met when I was 13 years old.
Where did the inspiration for Alice’s traits and dialogue come from?
Alice is a character who is very much alive in my head. Her physical appearance, habits, manners, and manner of speaking, and sardonic sense of humor at extreme human behavior are tools of her personality to confront and deal with what she considers stupidity, discrimination, and injustices.
The church shoes become more than just evidence—they represent memory, loss, and the search for answers. How did you develop that symbol throughout the story?
Alice identifies, realizes, and comments on her mother’s church shoes as symbols of her mother’s human values, which are treasured by Alice and conveyed in her many character encounters and interactions throughout the novel.
What do you hope readers take away from Alice’s journey about persistence, justice, and the importance of confronting the past?
Alice’s journey of persistence in pursuit of justice against political corruption provides readers with a strong feminine hero to admire and to be inspired.
Confronting the past, the phrase that “history repeats itself” is more evident now than ever with the attempted destruction and demise of American Democracy by Donald Trump’s authoritarian dictatorship, his corrupt administration, and his racist ICE brownshirts terrorizing, intimidating, and imprisoning innocent citizens, including children, as a revisitation of Hitler’s SS, the basis for the Nazi German American Bund in Church Shoes.
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Church Shoes
Robert Tucker’s Church Shoes is a historical mystery and coming-of-age novel centered on Alice Quint, a sharp, stubborn teenager whose mother disappears after a Sunday church service. The only immediate clue is a pair of church shoes found along a country road. Set against the Great Depression and the rise of the German American Bund, the story follows Alice from her family’s uneasy relocation to rural Illinois through her adult career as a lawyer. What begins as a missing-person mystery gradually widens into a story about family secrets, political extremism, institutional cruelty, and a daughter’s refusal to stop asking questions.
Alice is the book’s strongest feature. She’s intelligent, combative, funny, insecure, and sometimes exhausting, which makes her feel like a person rather than a polished heroine. Her narration has an appealing bluntness, especially when she comments on social expectations for girls and women. The novel also gives plenty of space to family life, friendships, school, romance, and professional ambition. These everyday experiences matter because they show how Alice’s search for her mother shapes nearly every stage of her development. The church shoes become a moving symbol of decency, memory, and the trail Alice follows toward the truth.
The book is ambitious in scope, moving through several decades and bringing together organized crime, Depression-era hardship, fascist movements, abusive institutions, wartime change, and women’s growing participation in law and public life. Its most powerful scenes involve Alice uncovering what happened to her mother and confronting the human consequences of secrecy and unchecked authority. The pacing is leisurely, with long conversations and detailed side episodes, but those passages create a broad picture of Alice’s world and the people who influence her. The historical material is woven directly into her personal journey, so political events feel connected to the dangers facing her family.
Church Shoes will appeal most to readers who enjoy character-driven historical fiction with a strong mystery at its center. It’s especially well suited to readers interested in determined female protagonists, complicated family histories, Depression-era America, early women lawyers, and stories about ordinary people caught in larger political forces. Book clubs may also find plenty to discuss, from the meaning of the shoes to Alice’s moral choices and the lasting effects of trauma. Readers who like a novel that follows a character across many years, while steadily uncovering a buried family truth, should find this an absorbing and thoughtful read.
Pages: 289 | ASIN : B0H1ZTM4TS
The Druggist: Inside the Murder Castle of Dr. H.H. Holmes
The Druggist, by Mark Vickery, follows Ben Pitezel, a rough-edged, vulnerable workingman who becomes entangled with the charming and monstrous Dr. H.H. Holmes in Chicago. Hired to help build and alter Holmes’s hotel-pharmacy, Ben slowly becomes both witness and instrument as secret rooms, trap doors, missing women, fraud, and murder gather around the so-called Murder Castle. The story tracks Holmes’s predations through Ben’s blunt, woozy, oddly tender narration, ending with betrayal, confession, and the doctor’s grim appointment with the gallows.
I found the book’s greatest strength in its voice. Ben’s narration isn’t polished, but it’s alive: smoky, bruised, comic in strange corners, and often heartbreaking without announcing itself as such. His grammar and phrasing make the world feel bodily rather than merely historical; Chicago isn’t a backdrop here but a place of soot, meat, gin, debt, and bad bargains. That choice gives the novel a slantwise intimacy. Instead of watching Holmes from the clean distance of a case file, I felt trapped beside someone who keeps mistaking danger for opportunity.
The book also works because Holmes isn’t presented as a simple midnight ghoul. He’s theatrical, fastidious, vain, and horribly practical, a man who turns language itself into another hidden corridor. I liked how the novel lets dread accumulate through workmanship: a chute here, a sealed room there, a door that opens to nowhere. The horror comes not only from what Holmes does, but from the ease with which ordinary people explain it away when money, status, romance, or survival are on the table. The dialect-heavy narration may not suit every reader, but for me, it created a mesmerizing feel that fit the material.
This book is best suited for readers of historical fiction, crime fiction, psychological horror, serial killer thrillers, and dark crime novels who appreciate voice-driven storytelling more than a clean procedural march. Fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City may be intrigued by the shared Holmes territory, though Vickery’s novel is grimier, more intimate, and less architectural in its pleasures. The Druggist is a lurid little furnace of a book: sad, funny, and hard to look away from.
Pages: 137 | ASIN : B0GSHCM8D6
Patriot of the Lowcountry: Eliza Wilkinson and the Fall of Charleston
Patriot of the Lowcountry by Tracy Lawson is a historical fiction novel set during the American Revolution, centered on Eliza Wilkinson, a young widow in the South Carolina Lowcountry whose private fight for independence becomes tangled with war, occupation, family loyalty, grief, and slavery. The story follows Eliza as British forces and Loyalist raiders threaten her home, her community, and the fragile sense of freedom she has built for herself, while Lawson grounds the novel in Eliza’s real letters and the civilian experience of Charleston’s fall.
I loved how immediate the book feels. Lawson doesn’t put history in a glass case. She puts us in the rooms, on the roads, near the marshes, and inside the fear of not knowing who is coming next. I liked that Eliza isn’t written as a perfect heroine. She’s proud, stubborn, brave, sometimes naïve, and often learning in real time. That made her easier to trust. The first-person voice gives the novel a close, confiding quality, almost like Eliza is sitting across from me, trying to make sense of what happened while still refusing to soften her own edges.
I also appreciated the author’s choice to make liberty more complicated than a slogan. The book is clearly a Revolutionary War story, but it keeps asking who gets to claim freedom and who is still denied it. Eliza’s thoughts about women’s independence and slavery give the novel its sharper bite. The dialogue leans a little polished for moments of crisis, and some themes are stated more directly than I usually prefer. Still, I didn’t mind much, because the emotional core holds. The book wants readers to see women not as background figures in history, but as witnesses, thinkers, risk-takers, and moral actors.
I would recommend Patriot of the Lowcountry to readers who enjoy historical fiction with a strong female narrator, especially those interested in the American Revolution beyond the battlefield. It’ll appeal most to people who like character-driven stories, well-researched settings, and books that mix personal survival with larger questions about justice and freedom. It’s reflective, tense, and quietly forceful. A good fit for readers who want their historical fiction novels to feel authentic.
Pages: 303 | ASIN : B0GRQBHT8Q
Sense of Foreboding
Along the Trail follows a young woman traveling westward with her family in search of new beginnings on the Oregon Trail, who learns about resilience, love, and the freedom and cost of such a dangerous journey. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I grew up in Kansas City, MO, which is about 20 minutes from the town of Independence, where the Westward Trails began. It was a point of interest for me, starting all the way back in elementary school. I found everything about it fascinating: the adventure of it all, the beauty of the wilderness, and the extreme grit and hope that the people of that time had to possess in order to even begin. But I also wanted to make sure to highlight the drudgery, the discomforts, and the dangers that they faced along the way. I didn’t want it to be overly romanticized, as that would downplay the magnitude of the obstacles that the travelers faced, which was the opposite of what I hoped to do during the story.
Winnie is a charismatic character that readers get to watch figure out who she is and what path she wants to follow. Were you able to achieve everything you wanted with her character in the novel?
I doubt any author can ever say they achieved everything they wanted with a character, haha. Well-developed characters often seem to move through their story on their own, and it’s all the writer can do to keep up with them! But honestly, I wanted Winnie to be representative of her time and her circumstances. That said, she had to be open-minded enough to recognize that some of her initial reactions to things she encountered during their journey were not justified reactions – rather, that some of them came as a result of fear and not from her own experience. I do think that she’s a relatable character, and even an admirable one. Not everyone will so readily admit to being wrong as she does. Not everyone chooses personal growth, but Winnie does.
What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?
I think one of the biggest themes for me was that the setting (thousands of miles of wilderness) was often the protagonist, but also sometimes acted as the antagonist. Such an environment was brutal and beautiful. Stunning, and stifling. It had to flow and change along the way, and at other times, remain so similar and vast as to seem unconquerable, like the travelers were barely making progress at all. It was important to me that the setting inspire both a sense of wonder and a sense of foreboding.
Another theme that I hope comes across is that of resilience, enduring hope, and personal growth. The characters experience some grueling physical challenges, and also some tough mental ones – things with the potential to break anyone’s spirit. But instead of turning on one another, or even turning back, they come together to form a community and rely on each other in times of need. I didn’t want my characters to be stealing from one another, or harming each other – I wanted them to represent the best of humanity, to help rather than harm, wherever possible. Perhaps that’s a bit naive, but there’s enough doom and gloom in the world these days; I chose to highlight human resilience and hope rather than focus primarily on division.
That’s not to say there aren’t some nuanced perceptions that the characters have to overcome to achieve personal growth, because that’s one of Winnie’s main character arcs. But she gets through it because she has the introspective honesty and open-minded nature to acknowledge a prejudice in her world, analyze the validity of it through what she experiences (rather than what she’s told by others), and come out the other side with her own opinion. And I hope that journey shines through for readers.
Will this novel be the start of a series, or are you working on a different story?
I’m seriously considering writing a sequel and making it a duology. There is a lot left to explore with the Hayes family once they reach their destination, and also a lot that I’d like to expand on with Mae and some of the other strong secondary characters.
Even though their journey ended once the overland travelers chose a spot to settle, their hardships did not. It was grueling work to build a homestead, to make it through winter in an unfamiliar territory. There’s a lot to discover there that I think would make for a great second novel.
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Threatened by storms, wild animals, and outlaws, Winnie must rely on the bonds she’s made and all she’s learned in order for them to make it to Oregon alive. She also must decide if she is ready to risk forming an attachment to Hal, the cowhand who has a knack for showing up just when help is needed, or whether she will emulate Mae, the free-spirited daughter of their trail guide.
The Path of Saints and Sinners
The Path of Saints and Sinners is the fourth book in J.F. Collen’s Journey of Cornelia Rose series, and it carries Cornelia “Nellie” Rose Wright into the stark and complicated world of Utah Territory in the mid-1800s. The story picks up with Nellie, her husband Obadiah, and their daughters after the grueling journey westward. They arrive in Great Salt Lake City, hoping for rest, stability, and a sense of community, only to find tension, hostility, and political turmoil instead. The book blends the trials of pioneer life with the undercurrents of faith, loyalty, and the uneasy intersection between the United States government and the Mormon settlers.
I felt pulled right into Nellie’s restless heart from the start. She is exhausted and homesick, yet her sharp wit and stubborn courage refuse to give way. The dialogue brims with energy, and the little details like dusty wagon wheels, harsh light, and the smell of mold on corn husks make the setting feel immediate and alive. At times, I found myself irritated with Obadiah’s insistence on pressing forward in the face of obvious danger, but then that frustration softened because it mirrored Nellie’s own. The writing does not shy away from messy conflict. It lingers in the gaps between what is said and what is felt, and I admired that.
The book meanders through conversations and stretches of description that sometimes slow the tension. Yet, even when I grew restless, I found myself laughing at Nellie’s sharp asides or touched by the innocence of her daughters. There is an honesty in the way Collen portrays family life, messy and tender all at once, and that honesty kept me invested.
I realized this book is less about resolution and more about survival. Nellie’s world is uncertain, and her doubts echo across the pages in a way that felt strangely modern to me. I would recommend The Path of Saints and Sinners to readers who enjoy historical fiction rooted in strong female voices, especially those who like their history layered with personal struggle and the grit of daily life.
Pages: 504 | ASIN : B0FHPXS955
