BID TIME RETURN

Shades of Robert Nathan, shades of lambent sentiment, shades of shades, in an altogether different mood from Hell House. Richard Collier, a young TV writer with only a few months to live, goes to stay in the grand-hotel-that-was, the del Coronado, where he falls in love with the picture of a Maude Adamsish actress, Elise McKenna, who had played the Little Minister and Portia and Peter Pan. As he tries to reconstruct her ""elusive"" life and the marked transformation of her acting gifts in 1896, he realizes that they had converged there at that time, really loved and then parted. The story is barely wafted across the pages before the dramatis personae disappear for good -- and it's a rather attenuated if sweet, sweet, sweet form of time travel on the next to last meridian.