Richard Collier, 36, has a brain tumour, and only a few months to live. Out of despair, he decides to dump it all. Determined to live his last weeks without a care, with the sole company of his imagination and dying dreams, he leaves home. He drops a coin, and drives off northward, along the west coast.
He reaches Coronado, near San Diego, where he finds an elegant hotel, perhaps one century-old, neatly reminiscent of a time past. He checks in. There he comes across a 1896 photo of a gorgeous theatre actress, famous back in the day, who played in this same Coronado hotel.
He becomes obsessed with the woman, furiously dragged by the past. Probably because the present is a nightmare. He develops a maddening wish to travel back in time and meet, in the flesh, his beloved ghost. Meet Elise McKenna.
With a titanic effort of self suggestion (and carefully following the instructions of a JB Priestley book*), with the sole aid of his mind, he manages to travel back in time. From 1971 to 1896.
Really? Or was it all just an hallucinatory effect of his brain tumour? Matheson won't let us know. Up to us to decide.
Anyway this is one of the most subtle time travel novels ever written. (I believe Henry James left one* unfinished also on the topic, btw).
With precision and literary skill, Matheson describes the psychological experience of being transplanted (and adjusted) into another century. What would it be like to actually find yourself in the 1890s? Time travelling was never so close and tangible for the reader.
The 1980 movie version is way cheesier in my view. The novel is undoubtedly better and more complex.
(More on this novel and its conception on the Maude Adams post).
*Man And Time, 1964. JB Priestley
*The Sense of The Past, 1917. Henry James (Posthumous and unfinished).
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