From the Dust Returned: A Novel (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: ghastly passenger, hundred chimneys, high attic, Ray Bradbury, Uncle Einar, Ann Leary (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

High on a hill by a forked tree, the House beckons its family homeward, and they come--travelers from the lyrical, lush imagination of Ray Bradbury.

From the Dust Returned chronicles a community of eternal beings: a mummified matriarch who speaks in dust; a sleeping daughter who lives through the eyes and ears of the creatures she visits in her dreams; an uncle with wings like sea-green sails. And there is also the mortal child Timothy, the foundling son who yearns to be like those he loves: to fly, to sleep in daytime, and to live forever. Instead, his task is to witness the family's struggle with the startling possibility of its own end.

Bradbury is deservedly recognized as a master of lyricism and delicate mood. In this novel he weaves together individuals' stories and the overarching family crisis into a softly whispered, seductive tale of longing and loss, death and life in the shadowy places. --Roz Genessee

From Publishers Weekly

If there's a fountain of youth, Bradbury has found it. In the 1940s, at the start of his extraordinary writing career, Bradbury produced a series of popular fantasy short stories about the Elliot family, an assortment of vampires and other odd creatures of various degrees of humanity living in a Victorian castle in the golden Indiana of his youth. More than half a century later, he has fashioned from these stories a novel, funny, beautiful, sad and wise, to rank with his finest work. Full of wide-eyed wonder and dazzling imagery, the stories retain as an integrated whole all their original freshness and charm. The plot is simplicity itself: the vampires and their weird kin gather for a homecoming and share memories. Among them are Timothy, a foundling, whose pet spider is named Arach (originally Spid), and Cecy, immobile in bed but able to enter the minds of others and control their actions. Once, Cecy got a young woman to treat an unwanted but worthy suitor more politely than she would have otherwise: "Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist's wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: `Thank you.' " Einar, a winged man, acts as a kite for children, writing "a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!" Most memorable of a remarkable cast are A Thousand Times Great Grand-Mere, who had been "a pharaoh's daughter dressed in spider linens," and her husband, Grand-Pere, who after four thousand years still has ideas. "At your age!" she snaps. This book will shame the cynics and delight the true believers who never lost faith in their beloved author. (Oct. 8)2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow; 1st edition (October 2, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0380973820
• ISBN-13: 978-0380973828
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #711,757 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars His masterwork, November 13, 2001

By	Rob Damm (Brick, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

If I could blame one author for my life-long obsession with the printed word, Ray Bradbury would be a likely scapegoat. His strange and sad stories are so braided with my own memories, it's sometimes hard to sort them out. After years of studying and teaching literature, I still maintain that Bradbury is a visionary. Yes, in my studies I've encountered plenty of cynics who would mock him as a sappy crackpot, but my love for his skewed tales has survived. That said, I strongly believe "From The Dust Returned" is his strongest work. A novel even the most screw-faced doubter must grudgingly admit is brilliant. I'm not trying to be grim when I say this, but it strikes me at once as the sort of book which could only be written by a great man near the end of his life. It has a sweeping, elegiac quality and easily meets all the expectations one might have for a novel 50 years in the womb. Of course, it is full of the fantastic, the sad, the phantasmagoric-- all crystalized in the amber of Bradbury's inimitable prose. It is a book of rememberances, through the vivid lense of childhood. It is a novel about everything-- love, death, faith. Above all, it is a novel about imagination and memory, and how through those concepts, it may be possible to, in a small way, cheat fate. I've read it twice already, and repeated readings are not only needed by infinitely pleasing. The writing is at once sparse and simple, but full of infinite secrets.

If you are a lover of Bradbury, you don't need my recomendation. If you are jaded soldier of the literary battle fields, come home to this wonder-full book and rediscover why you started reading books in the first place.

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mr. October hits another home run, November 1, 2001

By	C. Fletcher (California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Never mind Reggie Jackson. I've always thought of Ray Bradbury as Mr. October. Hearing the name Bradbury conjures images for me of street gutters overflowing with piles of slick autumn leaves, the air saturated with the sharp scent of woodsmoke. Bradbury means brief, shadow-strewn, priceless afternoons seamlessly spilling over into long, sweet-smelling nights. It means being a child and falling in love with reading for the first time. It means being in love with life and being amazed by all of the possibilities of the imagination. Bradury also means combating the forces that would strip these feelings of freedom from your soul. Bradbury is a force for good, a medicine for melancholy, and as such, never goes out of style.

Ray Bradbury's new book, From the Dust Returned: A Family Remembrance, his first novel of the 21st century, began life over fifty years ago, in the first half of the 20th century, as a short story called "Homecoming." Originally published in the 1946 Halloween issue of The New Yorker, along with an illustration by Charles Addams, creator of The Addams Family, "Homecoming" told the story of a family of strange nocturnal creatures-possibly vampires, possibly not-who lived in a grand old gabled house somewhere in the mythical October Country of Illinois. Drawn largely from his childhood experiences with his own large, eccentric family, Bradbury's Elliotts were overrun with strange aunts and uncles, weird nieces and nephews. Some could travel the world without ever leaving the attic. Some could fly, some were as old as the oldest grain sand in the Egyptian desert. At the time, Bradbury planned on fleshing the story out, and made plans with Charles Addams to collaborate on what would become an illustrated family history of the Elliotts. The plans never came to fruition, however, and although Bradbury would periodically check in with the family over the years in his short stories, the book never came to be. Not until now, anyway.

With his 80th birthday approaching, Bradbury's editor insisted that he finally finish the saga of the Elliotts. So Bradbury collected all of the Elliott story he had written over the years and shaped them, along with a lot of new material, into a novel of short stories, similar in structure to his own Dandelion Wine, or its prototype, Sherwood Anderson's Winesberg, Ohio. The resulting two hundred pages of virtual prose poetry, often Shakespearean in its lucid, agile metaphors, tells the complete history of the Elliott family and how they came to be and how they almost ceased to be. The history never elaborates on what exactly the Elliotts are, though.

This is just as well. It's not important whether they are vampires, ghosts, werewolves, or witches. What's important is that you believe in them. The Elliotts' greatest enemy over the years has been the modern tendency towards skepticism and disbelief. When science, philosophy, and cynicism "disproved" God, all of God's darker shadows, the vampires, ghouls, ghosts, and witches that make up the Elliott clan had no choice but to crumble right along into non-existence.

In From the Dust Returned, Bradbury makes a strong case for believing in things you can't see in the harsh light of the day. Whether they're ghosts, ghouls, God (however you define him/her), magic, wonder, the important thing is that you believe. These are the things that make us well again, that re-inflate us and cure us of the crumpling sicknesses that breed so fertilely in our modern minds.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Do You Remember How It Felt To Be Ten?, May 9, 2002

By	"covergerl" (NY, US) - See all my reviews

Not since the day, I brought home a tattered copy of The Illustrated Man have I ever forgotten Ray Bradbury's name nor his legendary ability to tell an eerily good tale. His gift for spinning a good tale has produced countless books and screenplays. His book Fahrenheit 451 is one of Science Fictions most fundamental works. Bradbury takes you into the twilight zone; he makes you feel ten again. That feeling of being the only one up in the house, at a quarter past three, with a flashlight under the cover, reading, petrified but loving and relishing every single minute.
So, it was with little trepidation that I bought his latest work, From the Dust Returned. I was excited, looking forward to reading this work that took Bradbury, an extraordinary 55 years to accomplish. Apparently, this plot had been the source and inspiration for the television show, The Addams Family, a show beloved by many including myself. I was expecting a masterpiece molded around a framework here called The Elliot Family. Here's what I got:
Timothy, the narrator of the family, is an orphaned mortal who is adopted into the odd, immortal and fantastical world of the Elliots. We meet his relatives, who sleep during the day in coffins, fly, are telepathic and are reborn from the dead. Most magical is his sister, Cecy, whose out-of-body experiences are the envy of all the others. She often takes her mortal brother along on astral projections and into the mind, body and spirit of other beings. She rarely, physically leaves her bed of sand, up in the attic.
Timothy's most ardent wish is not to have a reflection, to be like the others, to live a thousand years. He, however, at his tender age, is left with the responsibility of recording their stories and carrying on their legacy. He ponders about death, life eternal and his strange illness, which makes him sleep at night, makes his heart beat and his body respire.
The world, created here, by Bradbury, is exuberantly fantastical, full of magic, and it speaks eloquently of the unfilled childhood wish within each of us, that we, all had the power to alter nature, to deviate from reality and change our surroundings as we desired. This is the nexus of the Science Fiction genre, man vs. nature; here we meet a whole clan who is exempt from the laws of nature.
The book, however, does leave one wanting. It reads a little better than what it is, a bunch of previously published short stories and pieces threaded together through Timothy and the guise of the collective family. The singular characters are not very well developed and the stories and time sequences are a bit hard to distinguish or place into a whole. It also drops off into an ending, which leaves the reader disappointed and not quite ready or willing to leave the exquisite characters behind.
Yet, Bradbury's language and use of words is poetic, and brilliant. Enough, to make this tale a pleasant addition to any bookshelf. The book would make an excellent nighttime read for a child aged 7-12, or for older readers who might need an introduction into the strange but wonderful mind of Ray Bradbury and those that need to be reminded.