From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance
by Ray BradburyMorrow, 205 pp., $23
I took a break from reading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes — a book I’ve read every single October for the past 21 years — to read this, his newest collection of short fiction in the form of a novel, ô la The Martian Chronicles. I managed it in about a day, and a very good day it was. No one’s yet come up with a satisfying genre tag to hang on the man’s work and those who seek to simplify his work so that it might be more easily shelved into place at, say, the local B. Dalton with the sobriquet “Sci-Fi” are missing the point entirely. Fans of the author’s deeply lyrical fantastic fiction will rejoice with From the Dust Returned and of course now I have not one Bradbury tome to return to every chilly All Hallows, but two, which, frankly, is wonderful.
There’s an interesting story behind From the Dust Returned. The slim volume collects Bradbury’s tales of the Elliot family, who, like the Charles Addams family, reside in a sprawling mansion atop a windswept hillock and get up to all sorts of macabre doings. Most of the original pieces come from Bradbury’s first short-story collection Dark Carnival, which was published under the legendary Arkham House imprint in 1946 (and then later, somewhat retooled, as The October Country). Now they have been linked together with a new grouping of similar stories that flesh out the history of the clan and their deeply poetic (or perhaps Poe-tic) night-tide meanderings. Which is to say that some 55 years after the fact, we have a whole novel about Timothy, the human foundling, and his extended family of lycanthropic, vampiric, invisible, and ancient siblings.
For many people, myself included, Ray Bradbury’s fiction is a pillar of their young adulthood and beyond; alongside Forest Ackerman’s old spook-rag Famous Monsters of Filmland, Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone, and various others (the short fictions of Charles Beaumont, Richard Matheson, and William Nolan among them), Bradbury’s deeply literate yet instantly accessible stories were easy (and fun) to read, but left clawed little hoofprints across our psyches that never faded away. Simply put, Bradbury is in a class by himself, a national treasure on the order of the Liberty Bell. Only spookier. It’s true what they say: You never forget your first Bradbury.
This article appears in November 9 • 2001.