From the Dust Returned

Logic demanding reader beware! From the Dust Returned is a work by Bradbury the poet, NOT the short story writer. One of the greatest voices in 20th century writing as returned to, perhaps for the final time (though I sincerely hope not), that October Country filled to bursting with Dark Carnivals, Magic, and Wonder. Again and again his words carry us around the world, singing a bittersweet song that is part Dirge and part Ode to Joy for all things shadowy and creepy, sweet and spooky along the way. As the twilight fades to dawn, all things nightly battle to survive a world that believes it no longer needs them. But without shadow how can we truly love the light, and vice versa? Again and again Bradbury shows a unique mastery of the tone poem in this gathering of tales that only he could write. So gather around the jack o' lantern this Halloween and listen to one of America's literary greats whisper of delightfully spooky things. Listen.

My first impression of Bradbury's DUST is that it is an artifact of times past. From the Charles Addams cover to the engravings interspersed throughout the body of the text, I get a feeling of a book produced over half a century ago. A glance at the copyright page (which for some reason is on page 203 -- after the text) shows that large parts of the book were originally written in the 1940s. Somehow, Bradbury linked them to a connecting story of a resurgent "normal" humanity threatening the vampires, werewolves, witches, and what-all residing in a strange Illinois farmhouse. And it all somehow works! It doesn't matter that the book contains elements that are dated across a wide spectrum of 55 years, which adds a poignant feel to the strangeness of the house's family members.The book's subtitle is "A Family Remembrance." Bradbury created another Addams family with real family values and with a real family's centrifugal and centripetal tendencies. In the end, it is one of Timothy's "uncles" who betrays the family, leading to its dispersal to the four winds. Ever since I read FAHRENHEIT 451 and THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES, I've felt that Ray Bradbury is one of our national treasures. There is a kind of sympathetic sadness, a loving kindness that permeates his work. Outer space is for him never far from the human soul, and vice versa. It has the effect of giving his work a universality that transcends genre writing. I expect to return to FROM THE DUST RETURNED, most probably in October, the month that will be forever associated with Bradbury.

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.

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, ghost

For many years Ray Bradbury has either been ignored or judged harshly by most critics. The people who appreciate him most are fellow-writers (such as Stephen King) who understand what he's doing, and the millions of readers who continue to read and re-read his books. What Ray is doing is writing some of the best fantasy stories and novels ever written. One hundred years from now I'll bet most of the critics' current darlings will be long forgotten, but that Bradbury, like E.A. Poe, will still be widely read. This latest novel is something of a miracle. In it, Ray has returned to the family of extraordinary characters he created in the 1940's in great stories such as "Uncle Einar" and "Spring Witch" and written about a reunion of this family. This is fantasy at its best and may be one of the best books in Ray's long career. I salute you, Ray Bradbury, for providing me with a lifetime of insight, unforgettable stories and characters, and all-around great reading. The brilliant Russian writer, Yuri Dombrovsky, who was suppressed and imprisoned during the communist period, uses a quote from Ray at the beginning of his masterpiece, THE FACULTY OF USELESS KNOWLEDGE: "And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And some day we'll remember so much that we'll...dig the biggest grave of all time..." I salute you, Ray Bradbury, the Great Rememberer.