There’s a lovely moment near the end of John Masefield’s book The Box of Delights. Young Kay Harker and Cole Hawlings – a wizened puppeteer, several hundred years old, who owns a box that can travel through time – have just rescued the staff of Tatchester Cathedral from the dungeons beneath the Bishop’s Palace where they’ve been imprisoned by a band of local ne’er-do-wells. As the boat carrying Kay and Cole drifts down an underground river through a “wide cavern,” Kay sees ancient paintings depicting “a procession of men leading bulls and horses” to their deaths. Cole says to the boy, “That was our old religion, Master Harker. It was nothing like so good as the new, of course, but it was good fun in its day, though, because it ended in a feast.”

Masefield’s novels are a glorious hodgepodge of boat voyages, witch covens, flying cars, gun battles with gangsters, talking cats, and time travel.