Time and tide wait for no man and that’s true of the historic low tide that comes once every 114 years at Dunwich, England.

A peculiar company of scholars gathers to see it.

There is Halsted, a literature professor from Miskatonic University. Yes, he’s handled the Necronomicon and talked to librarian Henry Armitage about it, but his interest is in Thomas De Quincey, author of the famous Confessions of an Opium Eater.

One is Rylands from Cambridge, another De Quincey scholar.

Another is James Wychelow. Halsted knows his name. He found and had published a letter by his ancestor, Thomas Wychelow. It recounts how he, De Quincey, and the apothecarist and antiquarian Paston walked the exposed beaches of Dunwich in 1821, the time of the last low tide. But Wychelow is more interested in the Holy Grail and a local variant of the Arthurian legend where Mordred and not Arthur is the hero.

And there is another scholar on holiday, Ridpath, a biologist in the civil service who seems to have an interest in the occult too.

Finally, there are two other civil servants, Vamplew and Conrad, living permanently at the Hidden Crown inn where the scholars have taken rooms. They will move from being mere background characters to significant players in the story to come.

Halsted hopes, by walking the Dunwich beach at low tide, it will help him gain insight into De Quincey’s book, part of which was written after the author’s visit to Dunwich.

And the Hidden Crown with its deliberately primitive accommodations and guest register bearing the names of Arthur Machen, Algernon Swinburne, and W. B. Yeats, is a character of sorts and Crome, its owner, has his own agenda.

When the ultra-low tide comes, Halsted will find himself increasingly surrounded by strangeness and secrets, perhaps of the cosmic, political, and occult sort. There’s more to be found on the bared beach of Dunwich than the treasures that fell into the sea when the town was partially destroyed by great storms in 1287.

To say more would kill, by literary vivisection, the book’s spell and elaborate, enchanting metaphors.

I’ll just say the story mixes in many other things too: how modern technology makes contemplation harder, the legacy of the Great War, poison gas, psychotropic substances, vast cycles of time, Cthulhu, marine biology, dreams, and the Old World vs the New World.

And there are still more depths to Stableford’s novel I haven’t mentioned.

At one point, Halsted says

"It is, after all, our duty as intellectuals to try harder than common men to wring sanity from confusion, just as it is the responsibility of artists to transmute the base metal of our nightmares into golden dreams, and the responsibility of apothecaries to discover instruments to soothe our pains and heal our wounds. Cthulhu can never be entirely erased, but he can be compelled to lie dormant, for centuries, millennia and eons, if not forever."

There is confusion aplenty here but also some golden dreams. ( )

Perilous Press is a relatively new small press dedicated to produing high quality mythos fiction that is not finding a proper home with more main stram publishers. Their first offering was a smashing success, Copping Squid, a book that collects the San Francisco Lovecraftiana of Michael Shea. The Womb of Time proves this was no accident.

I know a bit about Brian Stableford, but I have not read many of his stories. I have no excuse. He has highly regarded stories in The Last Continent (The Light of Achernar), Shadows Over Baker Street (Art in the Blood) and Black Wings (The Truth About Pickman), all of which I have and none of which I have finished. Mr. Stableford also reprinted two other Lovecraftian tales in The Innsmouth Heritage and Other Sequels. He is a widely published autho and is more of a scholar than even his beloved HPL, translating French science fiction English. Being such an accomplished man, how can he help being drawn to the typical soliatary, antiquarian and scholarly Lovecraft protagonist?

The Womb of Time collects two novellas that allow Mr. Stableford to display his erudition to its fullest. In the first, The Womb of Time, a group of scholars interested in the real life figure Thomas De Qunicey (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_De_Quincey) uncover a new revelation that his greatest work, 1921's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, was actually composed in the real life English village of Dunwich (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunwich). Stableford incorporates these real settings into his work that give it layers of verisimilitude, like Lovecraft so frequently did, most notably in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. Ingeniously, he postulates that de Qunicey was in the town of Dunwich during a century low tide that exposed a span of the coast where the city used to be not normally trod by people, and that this was part of the inspiration for his book. These scholars, the cheifest of whom, Halsted, nails from Arkham University, find out about this and gather again in Dunwich at the same tide as the next century tide in 1935, hoping to see what had such an effect on de Qunicey. There are undercurrents of competing ideas and desires, some cryptic references to weapons of war and poison gas from the Great War and, Arthurian allusions as well the underlying menace of Cthulhu (not necessarily used quite as HPL did). These all blend seamlessly into a mesmerising whole that is quite a compelling read. I would say, however, in both praise and criticism, that this is a scholar's book. I had to work hard to keep up, reading online about the many aspects of de Qunicey's life I knew nothing about. Also the language ends up being better read than said; the dialogue often reads like nothing anyone would actually say. For example, when his rival stumbles into his room in the middle of the night having awoken from a terrible dream, Halsted proceeds to give him a doctoral dissertation, instead of saying "Dude! You OK?" or somesuch.

As much as I liked The Womb of Time, I thought The Legacy of Erich Zann was even more brilliant. Many authors have written pastiches and sequels to HPL's tale, but no one except Mr. Stableford would have thought to combine this story with Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin, from Poes' The Murders in the Rue Mrgue and The Purloined Letter. In fact, instead of coming to this story de novo I suggest readers peruse both HPL's story and these nes by Poe; it will increase you enjoyment of Mr. Stableford's achievement. I also heartily recommend listening to Tartini's The Devil's Trill (recordings freely available on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YonqEbar8cM). Mr. Stableford beautifully sets this and Zann's story in 19th century Paris, and actually lets us know where in Paris Zann's abode was. We get to read theories of using music to achieve a sublime (not necessarily in a good way) mental state, get a feel for life in Paris of that time, find out about the Parisian theater and participate ina increasingly tense murder investigation. This is heady, wonderful stuff, the best Zann sequel ever.

The Womb of Time is available in a limited edition hardcover (I have signed copy #34 of 250, gloat, gloat) and a nice trade paperback. The hardcover has wonderful slipcover and interior art Cyril van der Haegen and a suitably laudatory intriduction by Mr. ST Joshi. There were a few typos but none that bothered me. What can I say, I think this is a masterpiece. ( )