4.5 rounded down
I loved the art style!

Not my kind of thing.

A Halloween delight

Beautiful drawings, World turned upside down. Pool Timothy, not being like the rest of his family, but appreciated nonetheless and loved.

This is one of my Halloween 2018 reads! Fun interesting Halloween tale by a prolific storyteller.

This is a storybook version of one of Bradbury's more popular stories, "The Homecoming." I didn't care for it all that much for two reasons. First, the illustrations are in a style that I find jarring and off-putting. They do not add to the flavor of the book for me at all. In fact, for my reading of this text, they are in dissonance. Second, I have never cared for this story as much as some of Bradbury's others. I understand why pieces like "The Fog Horn" and "A Sound of Thunder" get anthologized over and over and over again. I may tire of reading them, but they are classics. But this story is mediocre in my opinion and does not move me as those others do. This book is for Bradbury completists only.

This was a rather sweet, but awfully short story with beautiful illustrations. I wasn't that invested in the story, but I found it charming nonetheless, especially the end.

Beautifully illustrated, kinda weak on the story front.

To inaugurate another October I just re-read Bradbury's classic The Homecoming. Though it has appeared in a few collections of Bradbury's work, it was recently republished as a stand-alone hardcover book with illustrations by Dave McKean. I encourage you to find this little tome and read it this October. It is quintessential Bradbury - chock full of metaphors that leave you spinning with dark imagery, cold autumn wind, and mysterious characters. I can't help but feel sympathetic and even akin to the lonely main character, Timothy. He longs for something he can't have, and may never have, despite reassurances that he's better off without it.

I know I've felt that way before, have you?

"And the wind began...As Timothy leaned out, a flesh-and-blood gargoyle, the vast armada of tomb dust and web and wing and October leaf and graveyard blossom pelted the roofs even as on the land around the hill shadows trotted the roads and threaded the forests armed with teeth and velvet paws and flickered ears, barking to the moon." - Bradbury, The Homecoming.

Born "normal" in a family of "things that go bump in the night," the main character of this beautifully rendered, astonishingly illustrated short story has to face the reality that he may die and go on ahead of those he loves, who are already dead. Wrenching and full of words, this was a discovery I was glad to make.

*Book source ~ Library

A “normal” boy tells of his supernatural family’s reunion, The Homecoming.

I normally like Ray Bradbury, but this book was just meh to me. I do like the concept of a normal person in an odd family, like Marilyn was in The Munsters. The illustrations are cool, but not really my style.

This was an absolute delight to read: the playful poetry of the language is totally enchanting, and Bradbury immerses the reader in a fantastically gloomy world. The prose soars like icarene ravens or Gothic buttresses and I was thrilled to go along for the ecstatic ride.

Clear parallels exist to contemporary characters like The Munsters and The Addams Family--with their trademark blend of monstrous characters, ghoulish humour, gothic tropes and family drama--but Bradbury adds some genuinely creepy moments to take it in a more unsettling direction.

It also has real poignancy, even tragedy, in the character of Timothy: forever isolated even within his close-knit family of vampires, lycanthropes and sorceresses.

Dave McKean has been one of my favourite illustrators for many years and when I spotted this in the used-book section of a little record store in Indiana, it was his unmistakable style which drew me in. His dynamically unhinged vision and plundering inks are a terrific parallel to the story, an esthetic marriage made in hell.

3.5 - Illustrated version of a classic Bradbury story. The illustrations capture well the eerie quality of the narrative, but the story is just a little too disjointed for my taste. I do like how the protagonist, the only human in a family of ghouls, grapples with his humanity.