From the dust returned: a family remembrance

First came the hill, the plain of grass, the tree, and the House. Then came the cat and Cecy, the Sleeper who Dreams. Bradbury weaves his magic as he introduces the Elliot family who share a farmhouse in northern Illinois with a bevy of ghosts, mummies, vampires, and Timothy, a foundling boy left at the door with a note declaring "Historian" pinned to his shirt. They await a gathering of spirits from across the world on All-Hallows' Eve. Bradbury, in his afterword, confesses that this book, a product of 55 years, grew out of "Homecoming," a story he wrote in his early twenties. Unfortunately, the book feels as if it were assembled a bit at a time. Some parts, particularly the tale of a fading ghost traveling the Orient Express and the story of Angelina Marguerite, a young woman born at age 19 out of her grave who grows quickly younger each day, are vintage Bradbury, reminiscent of his classic Dandelion Wine. Other parts seem like dead ends and confusing rambles. The Charles Addams' illustrations are a nice touch, and Bradbury, even not at top form, has a devoted following. Expect plenty of initial demand. --Candace Smith

If there's a fountain of youth, Bradbury has found it. In the 1940s, at the start of his extraordinary writing career, Bradbury produced a series of popular fantasy short stories about the Elliot family, an assortment of vampires and other odd creatures of various degrees of humanity living in a Victorian castle in the golden Indiana of his youth. More than half a century later, he has fashioned from these stories a novel, funny, beautiful, sad and wise, to rank with his finest work. Full of wide-eyed wonder and dazzling imagery, the stories retain as an integrated whole all their original freshness and charm. The plot is simplicity itself: the vampires and their weird kin gather for a homecoming and share memories. Among them are Timothy, a foundling, whose pet spider is named Arach (originally Spid), and Cecy, immobile in bed but able to enter the minds of others and control their actions. Once, Cecy got a young woman to treat an unwanted but worthy suitor more politely than she would have otherwise: "Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist's wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: `Thank you.' " Einar, a winged man, acts as a kite for children, writing "a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!" Most memorable of a remarkable cast are A Thousand Times Great Grand-Mere, who had been "a pharaoh's daughter dressed in spider linens," and her husband, Grand-Pere, who after four thousand years still has ideas. "At your age!" she snaps. This book will shame the cynics and delight the true believers who never lost faith in their beloved author. (Oct. 8) FYI: Last fall Bradbury received the National Book Foundation's 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Wondering what Bradbury has been doing since the publication of his last novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, in 1992? Completing this new account (55 years in the making) of his popular Elliot family. To celebrate, the publisher has declared October Ray (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

At last-a book you can judge by its cover. For this one sports a wonderfully macabre illustration born of Charles Addams's brief collaboration with master fantasist Bradbury, best known for such classic fiction as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and Fahrenheit 451 (1953). First conceived in 1945 (as a disarming afterword informs us) and only recently finished, this volume records the return appearance of "the October people," an otherworldly family initially encountered in Bradbury's early short story "Homecoming." They hail from ancient Egypt and Old Europe and have levitated in a hinterland between life and death for lo, these many centuries. Now ruefully aware that "the age of discovery and revelations" has rendered them obsolete, they take in a foundling named Timothy designated as the family's historian (and this novel's narrator). Timothy's tale comprises an episodic succession of portraits of family notables, including its rather portentous matriarch ("A Thousand Times Great Grandmere"); visionary Cecy, who can "inhabit" the bodies and souls of various human, animal, and inanimate objects; Uncle "John the Unjust"; and (most amusing of them all) winged Uncle Einar, whose trafficking with humans creates numerous aerodynamic problems. (Whenever he falls to earth, he makes a sound "like a huge telephone book dropped from the sky.") They all eventually succumb to the indifference of a world disinclined to believe they exist (an interesting parallel here to Neil Gaiman's current American Gods, p. 682), and Timothy-a reverse Pinocchio who yearned to become an unreal boy-realizes he must after all live in a fallen, unimaginative world where relatives don't fly or influence the thoughts of rocks and stones and trees. A far cry from the great early stories, but filled with a nostalgic charm that vitiates Bradbury's notorious rhetorical laxness and sentimentality. One of his most attractive and satisfying works in quite some time.

First came the hill, the plain of grass, the tree, and the House. Then came the cat and Cecy, the Sleeper who Dreams. Bradbury weaves his magic as he introduces the Elliot family who share a farmhouse in northern Illinois with a bevy of ghosts, mummies, vampires, and Timothy, a foundling boy left at the door with a note declaring "Historian" pinned to his shirt. They await a gathering of spirits from across the world on All-Hallows' Eve. Bradbury, in his afterword, confesses that this book, a product of 55 years, grew out of "Homecoming," a story he wrote in his early twenties. Unfortunately, the book feels as if it were assembled a bit at a time. Some parts, particularly the tale of a fading ghost traveling the Orient Express and the story of Angelina Marguerite, a young woman born at age 19 out of her grave who grows quickly younger each day, are vintage Bradbury, reminiscent of his classic Dandelion Wine. Other parts seem like dead ends and confusing rambles. The Charles Addams' illustrations are a nice touch, and Bradbury, even not at top form, has a devoted following. Expect plenty of initial demand. ((Reviewed August 2001)) Copyright 2001 Booklist Reviews

Wondering what Bradbury has been doing since the publication of his last novel, Green Shadows, White Whale, in 1992? Completing this new account (55 years in the making) of his popular Elliot family. To celebrate, the publisher has declared October Ray Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Bradbury is the author of over 500 published works in a variety of genres, among them such classics as Fahrenheit 451. In a novel first conceived over 50 years ago, he reintroduces readers to the unforgettable Elliott family. (The Elliotts originally appeared in Bradbury's debut short-story collection, Dark Carnival, 1948, which was later reprinted in 1955 as The October Country.) Written in trademark Bradbury style, the book reads like liquid poetry while telling the interconnected stories of a number of unusual yet strangely familiar family members. The actions and reactions of Timothy, a family foundling who functions as their historian (and also happens to be human and therefore remarkable), serve as the common thread linking many of these tales. The book's publication coincides with the publisher's launch of a new author web site at www.raybradbury.com. A new novel by Bradbury is an event worth noting, and this is a necessary purchase for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/01.] Rachel Singer Gordon, Franklin Park Lib., IL Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

If there's a fountain of youth, Bradbury has found it. In the 1940s, at the start of his extraordinary writing career, Bradbury produced a series of popular fantasy short stories about the Elliot family, an assortment of vampires and other odd creatures of various degrees of humanity living in a Victorian castle in the golden Indiana of his youth. More than half a century later, he has fashioned from these stories a novel, funny, beautiful, sad and wise, to rank with his finest work. Full of wide-eyed wonder and dazzling imagery, the stories retain as an integrated whole all their original freshness and charm. The plot is simplicity itself: the vampires and their weird kin gather for a homecoming and share memories. Among them are Timothy, a foundling, whose pet spider is named Arach (originally Spid), and Cecy, immobile in bed but able to enter the minds of others and control their actions. Once, Cecy got a young woman to treat an unwanted but worthy suitor more politely than she would have otherwise: "Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist's wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: `Thank you.' " Einar, a winged man, acts as a kite for children, writing "a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!" Most memorable of a remarkable cast are A Thousand Times Great Grand-Mere, who had been "a pharaoh's daughter dressed in spider linens," and her husband, Grand-Pere, who after four thousand years still has ideas. "At your age!" she snaps. This book will shame the cynics and delight the true believers who never lost faith in their beloved author. (Oct. 8) FYI: Last fall Bradbury received the National Book Foundation's 2000 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.