From the Dust Returned

The story should go something like this...

Once upon a time, a young and very precocious Ray Bradbury wrote a short story which he sent to Weird Tales. They promptly rejected it on the grounds that “Weird Tales desired first cousins to Edgar Allan Poe’s Amontillado or Washington Irving’s thrown pumpkin head.” And “Homecoming” certainly didn’t fit.

On a hunch, Bradbury sent the thing to Mademoiselle magazine, who telegramed! him some months later with their plans to publish. They were going to wrap their whole October issue around the story. They’d get guest essays and this rather obscure guy, Charles Addams, from The New Yorker magazine to do some illustrations. Yes, that Charles Addams, who would give the world The Addams Family.

This was the project which brought Charles and Ray together. They talked about a book. The stories one could write, the illustrations the other could make. The collaboration never came to pass. Charles went spooky and ooky and Ray was too busy being “the world’s greatest living science fiction writer” as the paperback copies of his books proudly proclaimed.

Eventually, as the years passed, after a short short or two, or three, got printed concerning that remarkable Elliott family, Bradbury finished this book of such long incubation: From the Dust Returned.

If you were to take all the elements Bradbury incorporates into From the Dust Returned and put them into the hands of another master, Stephen King say, you’d end up with something looking a lot like a cross section of the existing Stephen King bibliography. But in Bradbury’s hands something entirely different happens. Bradbury is not a horror master and doesn’t intend or pretend to be. Neither is he into Charles Addams’ sit-com of spookiness and fiendish fun, with has just the right touch of madness, like a hint of spice. In Bradbury’s hands, the elements which make us squirm and are the stuff of nightmares, are familiar, almost genteel; they produce a smile. Not the smile of the psychopath ready for serious work, but a smile of delight. From the Dust Returned echoes his work in Dandelion Wine. It’s almost an inverse. In Dandelion Wine we have the small town, the boy, the ordinary, but in the height of the afternoon summer sunshine and the glomming of oncoming night, magic fills everything with wonder. In From the Dust Returned, it is the family which is extraordinary; the place setting of the House is fantastical. It is this family of the almost magical, almost gruesome, which must face the onslaught of ordinary reality. It’s a fight they’re loosing. For how can things and people who go bump in the night, not merely as an occupation mind, but as something built into their blood - how can they hope to compete with the modern world and modern disbelief? The short answer is that they can’t.

From the Dust Returned is basically split into two sections. The first is the joy of family and reunion. When the vast Elliott family, whether they fly, lope, or don’t rise before the sun has set, all gather at a vast ancient house for homecoming. The later is characterized by the acceptance of the realities of their situation, combined with a spirited (ha ha!) defense.

One of the best elements Bradbury weaves in this tale is Ancient Egypt, land of the Pharaohs, land of mysteries, land where the mysteries begin. And if anything, the Elliott Family is full of Mystery. This point might seem obscure until you reflect that with the finding of King Tutankhamon in 1922, an egyptian craze hit America, if not the world. King Tut and everything Egypt influenced everything, art and architecture, literature and movies; it fired young boy’s imaginations, giving them a place of mystery to dream about. So, considering Bradbury’s age, the long incubation time, and the background of the novel, this is a superb rendering of the motif of wonder in that era.

The highest complement I can make to this most excellent work is this: about 50 pages in, I stopped for a break. The edition I read for the grandmaster challenge was checked out of the library, so I went online to price out what a first edition, first printing, hardbacks were going for. And the rest of Bradbury I own are all umpteenth printing paperbacks too.

In 1948, when Bradbury wrote to Addams about their nascent project together, he expressed the wish that this collaboration book might grow to be like A Christmas Carol, in the sense that it was tied to a holiday and that many people would reread the original at that time of year. Some, he figured, would do so every year as part of their Christmas rituals, just as many of us must watch our favorite christmas movies again. Even though that collaboration never came to fruition, we have this wonderful book. And how fitting is it that Neil Gaiman is trying to start a new Halloween tradition: all Hallow’s Read, were people give scary books along with the sugar high goodness.

I know of at least one book on my October reading stack. But for tonight, I’ll have to settle with this.

Queue music Mr. Vic Mizzy.

“They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky, they’re altogether ooky, the Addams family.”