"Enter the strange world of the
Elliott family...it will change you forever in the attic where the rain touched
the roof softly on spring days and where you could feel the mantle of snow outside,
a few inches away, on December nights, a thousand-time great Grandmere existed.
She did not live, nor was she eternally dead, she...existed. She is the
grandmother of the Elliott family, which includes mind-readers, vampires and
many others...maybe. In a strange old house, they gradually come together,
mixing their arcane skills and life-styles, falling in and out of love and
changing the world around them forever. You have never seen their like before."
From
the Dust Returned is not really a novel, and even as short stories, does not
really become anything to fully understand. There are lots of weird creatures
with strange powers that are en route to a family homecoming at the Elliot
house in Illinois. While there, we are told a few stories about some of them
which seem to be almost entirely unlinked to each other but for the repeated
appearance of a few of the characters. Some research brought up
that the book originated as short stories written over a long period of time (1945
to around 2000) which Bradbury then brought together in 2001, writing linking
portions to try to give it some kind of coherent structure. It really does not
work, and I found myself struggling through it. Ray Bradbury’s lyrical prose is
fantastic, but I began to ponder if this book was just simply designed to fulfill
a contract (and he would only publish two more novels in the early ‘aughts
before his death in 2012). I mean, in some sense, this book has a lot of
typical dark fantasy that Bradbury always liked, with its themes of growing up
and stop believing in magic, the supernatural, and the wonders of endless
summers that come crashing when The October People arrive. But it’s mish-mash
of weirdness, ghosts, vampires, werewolves, and mummy’s fails to be a great
book.
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