This is the first Ray Bradbury book i've read. *cringes* But it was the most beautiful story i've heard in a long time. Mr. Bradbury knows how to paint the most vivid pictures in ones mind with his words. The dream-like atmosphere is enough to lull one into a mind-set where truly, a family such as this, can exist. It is a quick read, but so worth revisiting. Overflowing with imagery and poetry, this book is just amazing....


It's like Shakespeare meets Poe & are married by Tim Burton. i reread it often.

This is a re-read for me. Read from October to December 24th, 2014. (Started on one holiday, finished on another!)

Ray Bradbury's beautiful language makes this a delightful read. I love the sentences and the pictures they form in my mind.

". . .the weather came in through broken glass, from wandering clouds going nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, and make the attic talk to itself. . . ."

"Invisible as autumn winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine. . . ."

"The House was a puzzle inside an enigma inside a mystery, for it encompassed silences, each one different. . . . "

This is the story of the House, located somewhere in October Country, and a boy named Timothy. A very normal boy, being raised by very un-normal people. There is a mummy, a vampire, a man who can fly, a woman who travels with her mind, and every other sort of delightful creature you can imagine.

There is fun, but there is also danger. After all, in a world that has rejected God in favor of science, the belief in spirits and the unseen has dwindled and the Family is starting to fray and turn to dust.

This book was many, many years in the making. Many of the chapters were originally short stories published in magazines. I think for this reason, the story is often disjointed and lacking a cohesive flow. As much as I enjoy the language and the storytelling, I wish it had been written from beginning to end to make it more of a seamless read. In one chapter, the barn burns down. In the next chapter, the Family gathers in the barn for a meeting.

The end of the book does not flow as nicely as the beginning chapters and I felt some of the magic was lost. Of course, I did take two months to finish it and that may have been part of the problem. I still enjoyed this book, but I felt the transition from various short stories to one novel could have been done better.

This really just did not land at all for me. It's clearly meant to be read aloud in spooky, floating, quavering tones, and I suppose the way it's written, with elliptical spookiness and mystical non sequiturs and a weird mix of vagueness and specificity, is supposed to contribute to that Halloweeny mood, but I found it mostly annoying and just badly done. Read The Graveyard Book instead.

Bradburys style is unique in his powerful and vibrant expression of the ordinary and the bizarre!!
And he has done it again!!
His poetic and powerful prose coupled with the imagination and fantasy born in his spirit has defeated all my preconceived ideas and notions..

The way Bradbury uses to put into words and give life to colorful and exotic characters has totally won me over..

"From the dust returned" is a funny and ironic written tale pregnant with symbolism denouncing the flaws and prejudices inhibited in our society..
Bradburys world is populated with remarkable, bizarre and colorful beings with strange and peculiar appetite for life!!

"From the dust returned" is composed of short stories beginning in 1946 and completed in the year 2000!!

The reader will be introduced to the so called "Family"..
Here you will have to dealt with ghosts, Mummys, winged humanoids, and all sort of beings pertaining to the realm of the night and the Halloween season..
Think of the famous and popular "Addams family", and you will have the right clue for the sort of entanglement and ambiente you will be involved in..

**On the Orient North**
Here you have a ghost travelling per train to the homecoming meeting with his family..
But he is in desperate need of help if he wants to be successful at arriving safe and timely to his destination..

**Uncle Einar**
What happens when a winged man loving the night gets married and must accommodate and sacrifice his peculiarities and preferences for the love to his family??
Well, read it for yourself and you will find it out..

**Make haste lo live**
This is my absolutely favorite one!!
Immortality, birth, rebirth, eternity, and the sparkling enthusiasm, freshness and joy of what it means to be alive..
And I loved it so very much how Bradbury describes and depicts the electrifying effect and impact that a beautiful young woman brings about with a mere kiss of hers!!

"From the dust returned" is also a wake up cry for all of us!!
Its an appeal for solidarity with the minority living under us, for understanding and acceptance in the midst of differences!!
"The family"members are so different and have such peculiar life styles, that they attract the suspicion, enmity, and open persecution from the society in which they lived..

"From the dust returned" makes a good reading for the Halloween season..
If you love ghost stories populated with all sort of dark and mysterious shapes and forms, and are also partial to creepy and fantastic tales veiled in a gothic atmosphere and a dense aura..
Then go for it!!!
This is definitely the right thing for you!!

Well,it was a real pleasure having read this one..
So I'll give it five stars, and recommendation to all my goodreads friends..

Happy readings
Dean;)

"The rememberers of noons." I like that. It's Ray Bradbury and his wonderful phrases and words that keeps the reader interested in this book. This is pure October (albeit I chose summer to read it) with wraiths and ghosts and vampires and werewolves and mummies all combining into one big somewhat happy family.

What ambience is there? Are we kin to autumn rains?

As the cover of the book illustrates (by the great Charles Addams), the centre of this book is a house, a huge house, in midwest America. It is the home of a strange family which is experiencing a reunion with members from around the world. These are not humans so it doesn't matter if there aren't enough beds, because cellar coffins and empty chimneys will do just fine.

There must be a mouse in every warren, a cricket on every hearth, smoke in the multitudinous chimneys, and creatures, almost human, icing every bed.

Somehow the parents managed to adopt a human child, Timothy, who wants very much to be a part of this strange family. The boy is much treasured by his aunts and uncles and cousins and especially by his ancient grandmere, she who was born into death two thousand years before Jesus and the crown of thorns. It is Timothy who helps to save the family when echoing whiffs of angry villagers with torches start their march.

Are we shadows on a ruined wall? Are we dusts shaken in sneezes from angel tombstones with broken wings?

It took me a bit to get into this, perhaps because this wasn't written as one novel but as a series of magazine stories throughout Bradbury's life, all woven together for publication in 2000. Timothy the boy is not strong enough to keep the level of interest high, but it all comes together toward the end. I am one of those folks who respect cemeteries in the belief that someone must visit the forgotten. That's what this book reminds me of, the wisp of remembrance we all have before our own time comes. Bradbury even captures the spirits who lurk behind squeaky doors.

While oils glistened the gates and doors of the world, there was always one door, one hinge, where I lodged for a night, a year, or a mortal lifetime. Put not butter, nor grease, nor bacon-rind upon my resting places.

Pure Bradbury. Since he was "raised by libraries", I have engaged upon visiting the local libraries more often in memory of he who could write.

Book Season = Autumn (October wings and fiery eyes)

second read - 9 November 2011 - *** I had checked out an audio cassette version of this book from the library, and started listening to it during a drive to St. Louis. My in-town driving is only in very short trips, and because the story is a little fragmented, I lost the thread listening to it. So, I finished it by reading the ending from the copy on my shelf.

first read - 3 June 2003 - *** There has been a lot of discussion of this book on the [email protected] list that I subscribe to, where the consensus seems to be that it doesn't work very well as a novel. Maybe all my reading of Bradbury books in the past month has somehow atuned me to the Bradbury universe, but I liked it. I had previously read a few of these stories in The Toynbee Convector, and that helped too. There are a few stories or pieces that don't seem to relate to the main threads of the book. They should either have been omitted, or there should be enough of them to give the general sense that this is also the story of a community as a whole, like in Dandelion Wine. The main stories are good, but the "novel" is not knit together well.

I think the central story of the book is "The October People" where the family tries to understand who and what they are. Timothy is the mortal child adopted into the family of ghosts, vampires, zombies, winged men, and other supernatural freaks, and stands for all of us who try to make our way in a world crammed full of imaginary creations -faiths and their counterweight, superstitions.

In terms of writing style, Bradbury does a few unusual things. For example, I noticed that page 54 consists almost entirely of a single sentence! (In "Homecoming", written in 1946, if you are reading a different edition.)

Overall, I'm very glad to have had the opportunity to read the book.

I am just thinking what an odd, odd book. It is so plainly written on the surface, yet so difficult to see what Bradbury is trying to do under the surface. I have some guesses, but much of it's pure conjecture on my part. I could be looking at his project with a strong filter based upon my experiences and could be significantly off.

Bradbury's six page afterword is quite an unexpected gift. Without it I was going to be left with only partial guesses what he was trying to do. With it, I think I mostly get it now. Please remember I am from Illinois, too, not all my life or even most of my childhood, but I did spend my high school and undergraduate years at a liberal arts college there, my most formative eight years. Trust me; this is relevant.

Fiction contains a sub-branch, a trick really (think of it as a genre, if it helps) called metafiction. Metafiction is what is known in theatre as "breaking the fourth wall." It's when the narrator stops telling the story in order to not necessarily directly address the reader, but to at least start talking about telling the story. The most famous (widely known) example I can give of this is the film "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," which also, coincidentally, takes place in Illinois. In the film, Ferris constantly addresses the audience, usually to offer advice from well beyond his years. Using metafiction, there is all kinds of fun a writer can have with his audience. For example, in "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," is Broderick's character the only one who breaks the fourth wall? He's the only one who directly addresses the audience. This makes it easy to overlook that Ferris's girlfriend, who never directly speaks to the audience, or pretty much anyone else for that matter, is also breaking it. She stares directly at the camera too long in some parts. She is unusually silent in other parts, indicating she is in the know of what is going on. In other words, she too is engaging in the story's metafictional aspects, but in a much more subtle form.

All throughout the book, Bradbury is using metafiction too, a term I was first introduced to through the writings of a University of Illinois professor named John Gardner, whose life was cut tragically short by a motorcycle accident (just as I began my undergraduate studies). His The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers is still the most insightful treatment of this 'genre' I have yet read. Bradbury's metafiction is of the more subtle form. I'll now attempt to describe it.

Bradbury's fictional concept is that throughout civilizational history there have been two types of mankind: the better known mortal kind you and I belong to, the one in which we live about 83, give or take a dozen, years, and then pass. We have no supernatural abilities. Perhaps 40 billion or so (Bradbury's figure, not mine) of us have lived and died. Then there's the somewhat immortal race which have lived alongside of us that have supernatural powers. Uncle Einar is winged. Cecy can inhabit bodies. Nef, Nefertiti's mother, also called grandmere has lived four millenia and has undisclosed insights regarding her kind. Grandpere, among other abilities, can house other souls, etc. Whenever mortals find out about the 900 million (again, Bradbury's number) of the supernatural race, bad things tend to happen to the supernatural race, like witch burnings, stakes through the heart, etc. So the supernatural race for survival's sake--they're outnumbered after all--has to stay hidden.

What the overall theme of the book is, the plot glue that holds it all together, is that Nef, or Grandmere, has called a Homecoming. Homecomings always take place in October and are a big deal still today in collegiate Illinois. People go back to their roots, the high school or college they attended generally, to party and relive glory days. Then they disperse. Nef wants to warn attendees that mortals may be getting on to them again, and that they must disperse to the four winds after Homecoming in order to self-protect.

The best part of the book for me are the six chapters that contain the six short stories Bradbury had written up until this point that were set within this structure. They are placed in wacky order, making the overall story even harder to follow, but these are chapters 5, 9, 10, 12, 15, and 20. Publication order was chapters 20, 9, 15, 5, 12, and 10. Bradbury says he wrote chapter 9 before 20, but that it appeared later because he had more trouble getting it published. I suspect the other chapters (than these six) are bits and pieces of other stories he wanted to set in this structure that he was never able to get published anywhere. I like all six of these stories, although my favorite is chapter 5. I so wish Bradbury were the type of author to have decided to revisit that story and expand it into a novel. There is so much more to be told. What happened when Tom went looking for and finally found Cecy? What happened with Ann, the girl's body who was used? What was Ann's story anyway? I mean, what did she have against Tom?

So, why do I think these six stories were metafictional? Bradbury tried to make them fictional. He wanted to place them in fiction magazines. So he tried to hide their origins, the fact they were coming from a metafictional structure, but he could only do so with mixed success. Sometimes the metafictional structure shone through, despite Bradbury's best efforts, and the story got rejected. "Homecoming" was too obvious, therefore Weird Tales rejected it. "The Traveler" was more subtle and was therefore the first (and only) of these stories to be published by Weird Tales. I share Bradbury's amazement that Madamoiselle magazine, a slick, published his rejected "Homecoming." When you have an illustration like Addams's to grace the October cover though, to go with the story, well let's just say that editor-in-chief had some wonderful vision to go with her courage.

I keep digressing from the metafiction question, so let me now address it head-on. What about "Homecoming" made the Weird Tales editor reject it? I think paragraphs like the second one on page 48 give away the game, the one that starts, "They're coming through the air and traveling along the ground, in many forms." Cecy goes on to describe what are probably vampires and werewolves among other creatures, but she's not telling their stories, or even about their stories. This is too low-brow for Bradbury. Instead, he's telling about telling about them, even if he uses fictional characters to do so. It's a thin disguise. The entire book is this same thin disguise, fictional characters telling you of the stories they could tell you, but aren't. Even in the six published stories that appear as those six chapters we get this subtle blend of story and of telling a story about telling a story.

It's brilliantly clever stuff! There are all kinds of archetypes to be told in these various stories. One is the "believe in me, a supernatural entity, or I will get weaker for the disbelief" archetype in the "On the Orient North" story. Another archetype Bradbury plays with is the possession story as featured prominently in Chapter 5, only Bradbury makes it interesting by playing with the possessor's ability to control the subject. If Bradbury failed to add this element he would have a character and story as dull as DC Comics' failed Deadman series of stories, for those familiar with that deservedly obscure character. That failure to possess absolutely opens the door for Bradbury to play even more with metafactional conceits as we watch the fictional character try to assert her fictional power, only to arouse Tom's suspicion that he's in a story he wants to step out of to get to the real story.

This book is difficult to understand. Bradbury doesn't seem to make sense at a number of places, particularly in the filler chapters. I concede all this. Nevertheless, I love this book. The writing is beautiful. There are a lot of memorable characters, fully as well as glancingly described. There are six good stories that stand on their own. And, perhaps best of all, Bradbury is playing all kinds of games with his narrative structure I get to try to wrap my little head around.

Pues... No ha estado mal. La historia no era nada del otro mundo, pero la forma que tiene Bradbury de escribir es, sencillamente, maravillosa.
Ha conseguido atraparme de principio a fin (Aunque no sé sí la culpa es suya o de la traducción XD).
Y el mensaje, el trasfondo que va desprendiéndose poco a poco, de cada pagina, culmina con un final que me llegó.

En resumen... 2 Estrellas sobre 5 por la forma en la que está escrito (o por la traducción) y por ser una lectura rápida y sencilla.

En este libro se presentan fantasmas, momias, un niño común y corriente y otros seres paranormales en una casa llena de misterio y oscuridad. En resumen, es como la Familia Addams pero en versión Bradbury, jajaja. A pesar de ser un libro corto, tiene sus altibajos y hasta aventuras. Lo que más me gustó fue el final, donde se habla sobre la naturaleza de la muerte (explicado para un niño). Me entretuvo y mantuvo mi atención durante toda la lectura, y creo que se disfrutaría aún más en Halloween, siempre y cuando en tu país se celebre esta festividad (no es mucho mi caso).

Pero, ¿por qué le doy 3 estrellas?
Porque este libro no es lo que uno espera encontrar en Bradbury, quien generalmente aborda temas de ciencia ficción en sus obras clásicas. Creo que esperaba algo más en esa línea, pero encontré otra cosa.

Bradbury lends poetry to death and beauty to life. His words are a song to behold and his dust dances to its own motes.

"The House was a puzzle inside an enigma inside a mystery, for it encompassed silences, each one different, and beds, each a different size, some having lids."

This is the story of a House that has existed for centuries, slowly evolving, and the Family that has lived there for almost as long, as all its members arrive at Halloween from around the globe, under the earth, and over the winds for a grand Homecoming. Reminiscent of the Addams family, but with more poetry and mystery (as well as one cat, one mouse, and one spider).

It's official: I'm thoroughly in love with Ray Bradbury's work.

This is one of my all time favorite Bradbury novels. When I was a kid imbibing on his short stories, the ones that stood out concerned this family and this house. I always wanted more of them. I wanted them all together. I wanted them in a format where no rockets intervened between stories. Then later, this book came out. My edition has a Charles Addams artwork on the cover which I find very fitting. I found the book delightful and nostalgic, well written, and the added parts made good transitions and decent mortar to bring the stories full circle and cement them together.
I was even able to read this out loud to my kids. It's so different from much required reading in school, altho I have been pleased to see some Bradbury in the school books. It also gives my kids a chance to get safely creepy, not overwhelmed by the latest precisely manipulated chemically induced high blood pressure that passes for good writing now.
This book is not a super charged race car of the hottest most fashionable design to force you from point A to point B. It is a sail boat, a beautiful one, tacking back and forth across the sea to follow the winds and then turn against them at surprising times. It bobs up and down. It has the sounds of creaking wood, the snap of canvas, the sigh of the wind. It smells of places I have never been to. The hairs on my arm react to something I otherwise can't detect. The story even tastes interesting.
Race car style writing just leaves me feeling attacked and tired.
Finally, if I were a writer and had been writing for so many decades that generations had grown up on my stuff, I would excuse myself a little repackaging of old stuff. There were limits on what Bradbury could do fifty years ago. Now he can do it in a different way that feels better.