I’m not sure this book was even worth the $1.87 I paid for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of Marion Zimmer Bradley. I loved Mists of Avalon and The Firebrand, her version of the fall of Troy from the perspective of Cassandra. And I loved the Darkover novels.

But some of her other work is just cheesy schlock SF, and I’m sorry to say that The House Between the Worlds is clearly in that category.

The basic plotline is that a young researcher in the UC Berkeley Department of Parapsychology agrees to test a new drug that enhances ESP, but in him and 10% of other users, also appears to fling them into an alternate universe. However, they appear there as "tweenmen" who lack substance and who must return to their home worlds and reunite with their bodies in order to survive. The world that narrator Cam finds himself in is at war with a villain who has figured out ways to bring evil troll-like creatures from still a 4th world into both our world AND the world Cam reaches through these drugs, where the trolls rape and brutally kill. Romance, danger, adventure, frustration, and mystery-solving ensues.

The work does have Zimmer Bradley’s characteristic feminist bent, and interesting tension between male and female characters around chivalry, appropriate behavior, and respect for women’s intellectual and leadership abilities. But in this book, the politics are less subtle and successfully woven into the story than they are in Mists or Firebrand.

The book is also dated. Published in 1981, it radiates having been written in Berkley in the 1970s. Reading the drug references today is almost jarring. The idea that a University would conduct drug experiments like the one central to the plot of this book is almost unimaginable.

Zimmer Bradley is a prolific writer. Read something else she wrote.