'Drebbel, Zander, and Zervan'

 

This is a running review of the book Spirits of the Dead. Find out more here.

I always enjoy discovering new words - new to me that is - and this story begins with 'Grangerising'. 

This is apparently the 'addition of relevant but extraneous material' to books. In this case the narrator mentions that long-established practice of adding titles in the back of a book, or inserting them separately, to whet the appetite of the discerning reader. In this case, a collector whimsically sends off for a book that was advertised many years previously, using a ten bob note. Imagine his surprise when the book arrives. 

Naturally our nameless protagonist investigates, and this takes him to the eponymous bookshop of the title. Here he discovers a most unusual woman, and her late husband's strange discovery - a kind of magical time machine. 

The problems of time travel have to be explored, while the origins of the Timepiece, as it is dubbed, naturally lead to many mystical revelations. The story ends with the narrator, having inherited the mysterious mechanism, attempting to fathom its ultimate purpose. 

Time travel is of course the province of science fiction, but there are temporal twists in many ghost stories and weird tales. As it happens, I read Ron Weighell's intriguing story just after I had finished a modern Japanese tale of supernatural time travel. Coincidence? Perhaps...