Bid Time Return

Richard Collier is thirty-six, a television writer, and has been told that a tumour will kill him within months. He gets into his car, drives without a destination, and stops at the Hotel del Coronado in San Diego, a vast Victorian pile that has stood since the 1880s. In a corridor of framed photographs he finds a portrait of the actress Elise McKenna, who played at the hotel in November 1896, and cannot look away from it. Reading everything he can find about her, he learns that after a week at Coronado she changed: her acting deepened, she never married, and she kept a book on time travel in her library until her death. Convinced that the man responsible was himself, Richard sets out to reach her by will alone, dressing in period clothing, removing every modern object, and lying in the dark repeating dates. Matheson wrote the book after seeing a photograph in an opera house lobby, and its first half is a meticulous, almost clinical account of self-hypnosis. What follows is a love story with a hard clock on it, and a final page that recasts the whole obsession without explaining it away.