In The House on the Strand, Dick Young experiments with a hallucinogenic drug that transports him back to fourteenth century Cornwall, just before the onset of the Black Death. His initial encounter is so overwhelming that he knows he must repeat it, even though he suffers horrible aftereffects. The more he finds modern life unsatisfying, the more he is compelled to return to a time when people and events seemed bigger than life. Du Maurier cleverly manipulates the parallels between Dick’s real and imaginary worlds so as to enlist sympathy for Dick’s rejection of the real world. Dick, who is unhappily married to a woman named Vita, who has two loutish sons from a previous marriage, is thoroughly disenchanted with the emptiness and boredom of modern life in general.
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