Books: From the Dust Returned By Ray Bradbury (2001)

"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.