In this haunting tale, Daphne du Maurier takes a fresh approach to time
travel. A secret experimental concoction, once imbibed, allows you to
return to the fourteenth century. There is only one catch: if you happen
to touch anyone while traveling in the past you will be thrust
instantaneously to the present.
Magnus Lane, a University of London chemical researcher, asks his friend
Richard Young and Young's family to stay at Kilmarth, an ancient house
set in the wilds near the Cornish coast. Here, Richard drinks a potion
created by Magnus and finds himself at the same spot where he was
moments earlier--though it is now the fourteenth century. The effects of
the drink wear off after several hours, but it is wildly addictive, and
Richard cannot resist traveling back and forth in time. Gradually
growing more involved in the lives of the early Cornish manor lords and
their ladies, he finds the presence of his wife and stepsons a hindrance
to his new-found experience. Richard eventually finds emotional refuge
with a beautiful woman of the past trapped in a loveless marriage, but
when he attempts to intervene on her behalf the results are brutally
terrifying for the present.
Echoing the great fantastic stories of H. P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan
Poe, The House on the Strand is a masterful yarn of history, romance,
horror, and suspense that will grip the reader until the last surprising
twist.
