From the Dust Returned

From the Dust Returned was forty years in the making. Bradbury first wrote about the Elliott family, a household of friendly monsters and immortals in a crumbling Illinois mansion, in a 1946 short story. He returned to them again and again across his career, and the novel that finally assembled these pieces is less a conventional narrative than a portrait of a family, the way certain families in fiction become more real than reality.

The Elliotts include Uncle Einar, whose great wings must be kept folded indoors, and Grandmama, who is too old and strange to be entirely human anymore, and Timothy, the one ordinary boy among them, the reader's point of entry into this world of benign strangeness. They are a family in the deepest sense: assembled from love rather than biology, held together by shared mythology.

The book is Bradbury's farewell to the gothic tradition he had inherited from Poe and Weird Tales, and also to the particular kind of American childhood he had spent a lifetime fictionalising. It is elegiac, tender, and strange.