The House on the Strand

By: Daphne Du Maurier

A 40-something Englishman married to an American woman with two boys from a former marriage has quit his job with a publisher in London and his wife hopes he'll accept the job offered by her brother in New York. His name is Richard Young--Dick--and he's resisting the move to New York, but still has no idea what he wants to do. His old Cambridge friend Magnus (the name reeks of the alchemists of old) is a successful scientist who has a "pet project" he wants Dick's help on. Magnus offers Dick his house in Cornwall for the summer. The house is several hundred years old but its foundations are even older (based actually on the house du Maurier lived in). In the basement, in an old kitchen, Magnus has a lab where he experiments privately. His current project is mixing hallucinogenic drugs. He's evidently taken it himself and has a sense of what will happen. Dick takes the drug in the free time he has before his wife and boys arrive. He goes back in time to the 14th century where he seems to be following Roger who lived in Magnus' house at the time. Dick is evidently still physically in the present but he experiences the world of the 14th century. The people he encounters can't see him and there is no interaction, though Dick becomes emotionally entangled in their issues, particularly in the troubles of the beautiful Isolde.... When Roger goes some place, Dick follows. But the terrain has changed. The sea has receded and what was a riverbed in the 14th century is a valley only in the present--with a railroad running through it. Dick with his problems and uncertainties in the present is drawn to the life of the people he encounters and literally becomes addicted to the experience, the somewhat more literal version of the "trip" described by LSD crowd when they alluded to the experience of altered awareness.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: B000NVCZB8
• Release Date: January 1969
• Publisher: Doubleday Book Club
• Length: 308 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.5" x 8.3"