Time travel isn’t just for science fiction anymore. It’s a surprising element in two of this summer’s juiciest beach reads, which usually run more toward sex, drugs and shopping (though there’s some of that here, too).

Andrew Davidson’s The Gargoyle reads like the mad spawn of Anne Rice and Stephen King, combining overripe prose and supernatural elements into a strangely irresistible confection. I’m mixing metaphors just thinking about it.

The book opens with a car accident in which the narrator, a “coke-addled” porn star, is burned so badly that he’s turned into “a blister of a human being.” Soon his only friend is Marianne Engel, who wanders into his hospital room from the psych ward telling him they were lovers 700 years ago after meeting in the German monastery where she was a nun. Naturally, he falls in love with her.

The present-day romance is interspersed with stories Marianne tells about doomed couples through the ages. She’s a Scheherazade trying to keep her lover from killing himself out of despair at his lost beauty.

I tried to resist The Gargoyle’s lunatic charm, yet I finally surrendered to sentences like this one, describing a hospital picnic in which Marianne provides the oil and vinegar and the narrator produces the overheated description of her feeding him: “She danced a swirl of black across the surface of the yellow, and then dipped a chunk of the focaccia into the leoparded liquid.”

And that’s just food. You can imagine how worked up these two get about sex.

The Little Book, by Selden Edwards, has even more literary aspirations, but its plot revolves around a near-incestuous romance between a young woman and her time-traveling grandson who hasn’t technically been born yet, so we shall declare it an appropriate hot-weather diversion.

The grandson is Wheeler Burden, an aging rock star who approaches his apartment one day in 1988 San Francisco and suddenly finds himself walking down the street in 1897 Vienna. It is a time and place with which he’s strangely familiar, thanks to a charismatic Viennese teacher at his boarding school.

Wheeler crosses paths with everyone from Freud to Mahler to his own father, who died a hero during World War II and has also traveled back in time, and his lovely young grandmother, who is living her life in the proper order.

He comes across as a decade-twisting Forrest Gump, always in the right place at the right time. His cultural references, both real and fictional, are eclectic:

“When asked the most important influences in his life in the now-classic 1969 interview in Rolling Stone magazine, just after the disastrous Altamont concert when he was nearly killed by a pool-cue-wielding Hell’s Angel, Wheeler Burden gave three: Victor Hugo, whose seven novels he had read for the first time by age 13; Buddy Holly, whose music he first heard in the Sacramento Valley when he was 15; and his Boston private school history teacher and mentor, Arnauld Esterhazy.”

Edwards has been working on The Little Book since 1974, and it shows. He’s created a complete world, one that’s a pleasure to enter. Unfortunately, he takes a few easy outs when it comes to explaining Wheeler’s adventures, which was a surprise in a novel that’s been percolating for so long.

The Gargoyle is published by Doubleday (468 pages, $25.95). The Little Book is published by Dutton (405 pages, $25.95).