Somewhen Else is a story of Dave Heston and Laura Benson, who may have never met. Dave and Laura are each having intimations of a life in which they did meet while passing through the Philadelphia International Airport in 1983. Living thousands of miles apart, both seem to recall that after having talked in an airport restaurant, they canceled their respective flights and together booked a flight to New Orleans.
Have they met? Will they meet? Somewhen Else is a story about stories. We all have stories. Both Dave and Laura tell us their stories, as well as tell us the stories told to them by people they meet and love. But all the stories can't be true. Can they?
Following the 2017 hurricanes Irma and Maria, Dave, a widowed retired lawyer. lives in the cistern of his storm ruined home overlooking Coral Bay on St. John in the Virgin Islands. A poem and musician, in his youth he headed up "Big Dave and the Hestones," a band that opened for Bill Haley in the early 50s.
Laura, also widowed, is a retired newspaper reporter living in a restored log home on Clarks Creek in Valle Crucis an unincorporated community in the northwest North Carolina mountains. She has been working on a book detailing a horrific murder and the subsequent trial of the killer. Like Dave, she is determined to live a full and independent life.
In a third part of the narrative, David Henson and Laura Benson, longtime residents of New Orleans, are threatened by Reuban Beachamp. Beachamp, who has killed and evaded conviction was wrongly convicted of and imprisoned at Angola for a murder he did not commit.
Somewhen Else is more than the story of Dave and Laura. Place and the relationship between place and human beings is central to the novel. Dave is a north American living in but not of a community that resulted from the displacement of people during the period of enslavement and abandonment, one that is in many ways a colony of the United States. In lesser ways, the same is true for the Appalachia where Laura was raised, has lived and worked. Both St. John and northwest North Carolina have seen their local cultures and mores affected by a colonizing tourist industry.
Somewhen Else is a story about the importance of stories. It has a complex narrative structure. The first part of the novel is told in the third person by a journalist Dave Heston meets on a delayed flight as he travels from St. John to visit his son in Pennsylvania. Feeling he is losing control of his story; Dave cancels his agreement with the journalist and takes control of his narrative. The second part is his first person retelling. Laura's narrative is fully in the first person.
Section three, written in the third person, tells of the life David and Laura have lived most of their adult years in New Orleans living in an apartment in the French Quarter.
