Bid Time Return

Richard Collier is thirty six, a writer, and dying of an inoperable brain tumor. He checks into the Hotel del Coronado, a grand old resort hotel, and there he sees a photograph of Elise McKenna, a famous stage actress of the 1890s. He falls in love with the picture. Digging into her life, he finds that she stayed at the hotel in 1896, and that something happened to her there, a love affair nobody ever explained. Richard becomes convinced that he was the man. By hypnotizing himself, he finds his way into the hotel in 1896.

He finds Elise, and they fall in love, against the wishes of her manager, William Fawcett Robinson, who has Richard abducted to keep them apart. Richard gets away and back to her, and his headaches vanish. Then, after they have spent the night together, he takes a coin out of his pocket without thinking. It is dated 1971, and the sight of it pulls him back into his own time. He dies soon after. A doctor puts the whole journey down to the desperate fantasy of a dying man; the brother who edits Richard's papers is not so sure.

The book takes an unusual form. The first part is Richard's dictation into a tape recorder, the second the notes he kept in 1896, with occasional comments from his brother as editor. The effect is feverish and intimate, and it pulls the reader along even when the romance runs thin. Kirkus, not unkindly, called it an "attenuated if sweet, sweet, sweet form of time travel." Matheson took the title from Shakespeare's Richard II ("O call back yesterday, bid time return"). Readers who liked Jack Finney's Time and Again will know the method, and anyone who has seen the film will find the novel more interior and darker.