As Jonathan Richman said, I love New England. Having said that, we’ve spent a lot of time in the nooks and crannies of my home region, peering into things both nnameable and unholy. So today, let’s visit Australia in the early 20th century as well as in earth’s pre-human past, as we encounter... “The Shadow Out of Time”!
The story:
Our narrator, Nathaniel Peaslee, loses 5 years of his life, during which time he is not himself. Literally. His wife leaves him, he studies much and travels widely, and when he regains his identity and sense of self, he has no memory of what’s happened in the years he suffered “amnesia.”
He does, though, have phantasmagorical dreams of alien cities. The dreams grow more detailed until they reveal the city exists on earth before humans and is ruled by a Great Race of iridescent cone beings who can project their consciousness through both time and space as they gather information for their giant library. (You may at this point have guessed what was going on while our narrator was an amnesiac, but it takes him scores of pages to reach the same conclusion.)
