Wrong Place Wrong Time

In some ways, Wrong Place, Wrong Time is a time travel novel, a long-established subgenre of sci-fi fantasy. Often dated to H. G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895), the genre of time travel became a staple of sci-fi: Characters board a vehicle or perhaps tumble into a different dimension through a previously unseen portal, or fall into a deep sleep and wake up in the past or future. McCallister’s work, however, is not so much a time travel novel as a time loop novel.

In a time loop novel, time is less linear than it is curved, with characters repeating the same period of time. A number of critically acclaimed television series feature time loops, most notably Netflix’s Russian Doll (2019-2020), an influence that McAllister acknowledges in her closing Note. A number of films also feature time loops, such as the romcom Palm Springs (2020), the slasher comedy Happy Death Day (2017), and the film Groundhog Day (1993), which Jen repeatedly invokes when trying to explain her dilemma.

Novels with time loops include A Week of Mondays (Jessica Brody, 2016), In a Holidaze (Christina Lauren, 2020), This Time Tomorrow (Emma Straub, 2022), and The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (Stuart Turton, 2018).