The Shadow Out of Time (Fantasy and Horror Classics); With a Dedication by George Henry Weiss - Paperback

His mind was stolen across the gulf of eons. His body was used by an alien. He is a ghost in his own life.

Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, a brilliant political economist at Miskatonic University, suffers a sudden, catastrophic mental seizure in May 1908. For five full years, he lapses into a state of profound amnesia, speaking in strange languages and exhibiting a vast, alien intelligence while his own personality is completely submerged.

When Peaslee abruptly returns to normal in 1913, he has no memory of the preceding years. However, he is now haunted by fragmented, terrifying dreams of a monstrous, pre-human civilization and a journey to a colossal city of non-Euclidean architecture on a dying world.

He soon discovers the truth, pieced together from forgotten memories and research into occult lore: his mind was temporarily exchanged across time and space with a member of the Great Race of Yith. These immense, conical, insect-like beings perfected the science of mind-transference, projecting their consciousnesses through time to inhabit the bodies of suitable hosts in any era to study history and catalog the fate of the cosmos.

Peaslee's true ordeal culminates in a terrifying archaeological expedition to the Australian desert, where he descends into the ruins of the Yithian city and finds written proof of his horrifying experience, a final, chilling message left behind by his own consciousness, which was trapped in a Yithian body in the deep past.

The Shadow Out of Time is H. P. Lovecraft's penultimate major work and a masterpiece of science fiction and cosmic horror. It is a staggering tale of identity loss, time travel, and the profound, chilling terror of knowing that human history is merely a brief, insignificant footnote in the timeline of the cosmos.