A Novel
SomewhereElse
Some doors, once opened, do not close.
"Haunting, imaginative, and deeply unsettling." NewInBooks
A Novel
Some doors, once opened, do not close.
"Haunting, imaginative, and deeply unsettling." NewInBooks
The Story
Joe Patterson has spent forty years teaching history from the safe side of a lectern. Then his hand closes around an artifact in a museum case, and the past stops being a subject. It becomes a place.
At first it feels like grace: Independence Hall assembling itself around him, Gettysburg's grief becoming his own, an ordinary man permitted to touch the moments that make a life feel larger than it is. His wife Margaret watches him come home lit from within, and changed.
He tells himself he can stop anytime. He is wrong. Something is waiting in those rooms with him, patient and very old, and it has begun to want more of him than history was ever meant to give back.
Somewhere Else is a novel about the pull of transcendence, the cost of chasing significance, and how easily a marriage, a family, a self, can be spent on something that was never going to give itself back.
The question was only how. What quality of attention would be sufficient. What it would cost to pay for it.
From the Prologue
There's a smell that comes into my study on certain nights: cold stone, dust, candle wax long since cooled. The windows are closed. The room is empty. I've learned not to mention it to my wife.
I've learned many things this year that I would rather not have learned. Among the things I've lost, in approximate order: my wife's trust, my son's voice on the phone when he no longer knows what to say to me, the use of my own hands without flinching, the certainty that the room I'm sitting in is real, and the man who walked into Independence Hall on a gray Tuesday afternoon to prepare a lesson on the Declaration of Independence. Among the things I've gained in their place: one. He's been standing in the corner of my study for three days now.
I'm writing this on a Tuesday night in October. Tomorrow morning, I'm driving to Washington. I know what's going to happen there, the way you know the last page of a book you've already read.
Page one. The rest of the book is how he got here.
The Sequence
Joe touches an object and sees the moment it came from. Eight artifacts, eight doors. Each one opens wider than the last, and each one brings him closer to the thing standing just outside the frame.
The Weight of Words
Jefferson's chair, Independence Hall
A tavern in Philadelphia, a sentence being written for the first time. In the corner of the room, a tall figure watches with its hands cupped, as though catching something falling from a height.
One Small Step
A fragment of the Apollo 11 heat shield
The first one he goes looking for. He chooses the moon landing he watched at eleven years old, sitting near his father, because it is the night that made him a historian.
Valley Forge
An artifact from Washington's winter encampment
The first vision that hurts. Cold, hunger, and a scattered army becoming a country. He comes home smelling of woodsmoke and cannot say where he has been.
Starry Night
A late Van Gogh canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art
He goes alone, to a museum he has only ever visited with Margaret, hoping a painter will explain his wife to him. For days afterward, brake lights are an unforgivable red.
Great Expectations
A Dickens manuscript, the Rosenbach Museum
In the case beside it, Bram Stoker's working notes for Dracula, and a description of a creature that feeds on the ones it transforms. Joe reads it twice and walks out.
The Sound of Silence
A Napoleon cannon, Little Round Top
A Union private's death, on a loop, for hours. Out across the field the figure moves unhurried among the dying, and it is not there to mourn them. Joe comes home ten hours late. Margaret sleeps in the guest room for the first time in their marriage.
Learning to Fly
The flight marker, Wright Brothers National Memorial
He has sworn off battlefields. He wants only wonder now. Gettysburg finds him anyway, in front of his own students, filling the classroom with the smell of the dying.
The Mind of God
The Einstein Memorial, Washington, D.C.
He knows what is waiting for him there. He packs a bag, tells no one, and goes.
The figure does not stay in the corner.
Why It Stays With You
Margaret has been reading Joe for forty-five years. She is the first to notice, the first to name it, and the last one still trying. The novel gives her a full interior life, not a worried look from the doorway.
This is an addiction story wearing a historian's tweed. Every vision costs more than the one before, and every one makes ordinary life a little quieter: a granddaughter's questions, a friend's phone call, a Sunday morning.
It was there in the very first vision, before Joe understood he could be seen. It is patient, it is old, and it is not a symptom. Readers who want a clean explanation should be warned: this book does not offer one.
For readers of The Time Traveler's Wife and The Cabin at the End of the World, and for anyone who reads John Irving, A. S. Byatt, or Paul Tremblay: an ordinary life with one impossible thing loose inside it, told with a horror novel's nerve.
"Haunting, imaginative, and deeply unsettling, Somewhere Else transforms the wonder of touching history into a gripping meditation on obsession and identity, drawing readers into a literary nightmare where every journey into the past risks erasing another piece of the present." NewInBooks
"Alan McKee's Somewhere Else is a literary speculative novel with the steady pull of psychological horror… 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."Literary Titan · Read the review
"Somewhere Else is a haunting masterpiece that seamlessly bridges the gap between rich literary fiction and spine-tingling psychological horror… McKee writes with exquisite grace, balancing beautiful historical vignettes with a mounting, claustrophobic dread." Sevag
"This book is a rare masterpiece that mixes a quiet exploration of memory, art, marriage, and the terrible weight of paying total attention to history." Jose M.
"Alan McKee's descriptions of pivotal moments in history are riveting. His ability to immerse the reader in these moments is fascinating." Michael N.
"Alan McKee has created a thoughtful supernatural historical novel with an intriguing premise, strong emotional stakes, and some genuinely haunting moments." Nyoka C.
"Quiet, elegiac, and impossible to forget." Suzanna N.
Get the Book
A first novel from the author of The Amplified Entrepreneur. Available in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle edition on September 1, 2026.
For book clubs and libraries: a reading group guide with a synopsis and twelve discussion questions is available at no cost.
Request the reading group guideReader Questions
The questions readers ask before they start, answered plainly, including the ones the marketing copy usually dodges.
Literary fiction with supernatural elements. The prose, the pacing and the interior focus belong to literary fiction; the premise and the dread belong to horror. If you need a single shelf for it, literary horror is the closest, and historical fiction with a supernatural twist is the next closest.
The novel spends most of its pages inside a long marriage and a working life, and the impossible thing at its center is never explained away.
Yes, but not the science fiction kind. There is no machine, no set of rules to master, no paradox to solve, and Joe's body never leaves the room. He touches an object and lives the moment it holds, from inside the people who were there.
If you have been looking for time travel books that are not science fiction, this is what that looks like: the mechanism is never explained, because the book is interested in what the experience costs rather than how it works.
Both books are about a man who comes unstuck from his own present, and about the wife who has to live beside it. Audrey Niffenegger wrote a love story with a time travel problem inside it. Somewhere Else is a marriage with an addiction inside it, and Margaret gets a full interior life rather than a view from the doorway.
The honest difference: this one is darker and it does not end in reconciliation. If what you loved about The Time Traveler's Wife was Clare's side of the story, Margaret will feel familiar. If what you loved was the romance, know that this book withholds that comfort.
That is this book's exact premise. The old word for it is psychometry: reading the history held in a physical object by touching it.
Joe touches Jefferson's chair at Independence Hall, a fragment of the Apollo 11 heat shield, a late Van Gogh canvas, a Dickens manuscript, a Napoleon cannon at Gettysburg, and four more. Eight artifacts in all, and each door opens wider than the last.
Nothing jumps out at you, there is no gore for its own sake, and there is no creature under the bed. The horror here is the slow kind: a man choosing something over his wife, again and again, while telling himself he can stop.
Readers who never pick up horror tend to finish this one. Readers who want a monster on page one may find the first third quiet. The dread is cumulative, and it is mostly domestic.
Particularly for groups that enjoy disagreeing. The ending is dark and deliberately unresolved, the central question of whether Joe is ill or genuinely haunted is never settled, and readers tend to split hard on whether he is a victim or the author of what happens to him.
A reading group guide with a synopsis and twelve discussion questions is available at no cost.
No. The prologue says so on the first page, in Joe's own voice, before the story doubles back to the beginning. You read the whole novel knowing roughly where it lands.
If you need closure, redemption, or a clean explanation of what the presence was, this is not that book. If you are looking for book club fiction with a dark ending, or literary fiction that leaves things unresolved on purpose, it is.
Paul Tremblay is the closest comparison for the dread and for the refusal to hand the reader a tidy answer. Somewhere Else is slower and more domestic than The Cabin at the End of the World, and it takes place over a year of ordinary life rather than a single unbearable day.
What the two share is the ambiguity. Both books put a rational explanation and an impossible one side by side and decline to choose.
The Irving comparison is about texture rather than plot: the density of an ordinary life, the long marriage, the band practice with old friends, the granddaughter on a knee, the adult son whose work his father cannot quite follow.
All of that is here, and then one impossible thing is let loose inside it. The speculative element does not replace the domestic novel; it happens to it.
Joe Patterson is sixty-six, with thirty-two years of teaching history at a community college behind him. The gift arrives late, and it arrives to a man who has built his whole identity on standing at a lectern and describing the past to other people.
Much of the novel's tension is professional as well as personal: his lectures grow strange, his students notice, and his department head calls. Speculative fiction about memory and history, told from inside the person who spent a career studying it.
