 Like many of du Maurier's novels, "The House on the Strand" has a supernatural element, exploring the ability to mentally travel back in time and experience historical events at first hand - but not to influence them.It has been called a Gothic tale, "influenced by writers as diverse as Robert Louis Stevenson, Dante, and the psychologist Carl Jung," "in which a sinister potion enables the central character to escape the constraints of his dreary married life by travelling back through time".The narrator agrees to test a drug that transports him back to 14th century Cornwall and becomes absorbed in the lives of people he meets there, to the extent that the two worlds he is living in start to merge.