From the Dust Returned, by Ray Bradbury.
New York: William Morrow, 2001.
$23 - 204 pages.

It (television) is just the revelation of the hour, the meaningless alarms and excursions of the week, the panic of a single night, no one asks, but death and destruction are delivered, as the children sit with their parents behind them, frozen in an arctic spell of unwanted gossip and slander. No matter. The dumb will speak, the stupid will assume, and we (the supernatural) are destroyed.

- From The Dust Returned, p. 177

Imagine this: Somewhere in upper Illinois in a county called October, there is a great house of 159 rooms and 99 chimneys that was erected in a single night. That’s right. Each mitered board, weathered shake and dusty window pane molded in the midst of a great thunderstorm, created from wind, lightning and whirling chaos. That was hundreds of years ago, perhaps thousands. For a long time, the house waited patiently, and then the residents began to arrive — a cat named Anuba, a spider called Arach and a nameless mouse. Each found a place that had been prepared for them in the attic, in the basement or behind the walls. Then, the others came: some on leather wings on a moonless night, some loped and others simply ... appeared. Eventually, someone left a human baby by the gate, and the “peculiar” residents decided to name him Timothy and took him in. He would be their historian, their biographer. They are all “strange,” perhaps “outré,” in “some degree rococo.”

So, Timothy grew and learned to write. Anuba slept on his bed; Arach nestled in his left ear, and the mouse lived in his shirt pocket. The boy watched his protectors and envied them. He learned that they were older than the pyramids, ate strange food, drank stranger wine and slept at odd hours. His Uncle Einar took him for midnight flights; the mummy in the attic with lapis lazuli eyes (a thousand times great grandmere) told him stories; and Cecy, the beautiful little witch, took him on marvelous adventures, for she could travel the world in dreams. Cecy could occupy the bodies of others — frogs, ravens, mariners at sea and young girls made wretched by love. Of course, she could take others with her, like travelers renting a berth, and she sometimes took Timothy.

By this time, you know that you aren’t in the prosaic, everyday world, but in a magical place created by Ray Bradbury, one of America’s most prolific writers. I am a bit amazed that 50 years have past since I read my first Bradbury book (Dandelion Wine), and went on to read a host of others: Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Golden Apples of the Sun, October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Illustrated Man, A Medicine for Melancholy. I joined a host of ardent fans who followed the author’s career from D.C. Comics to published novels and short stories and saw many of their favorite tales adapted (and readapted) to television — “The Twilight Zone,” “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Outer Limits.” There were movie versions, too, and for a time Bradbury hosted his own TV program. Now in his 80s and the survivor of multiple heart surgeries, he is prolific as ever. From the Dust Returned is ample proof of that.

Over the years, I have struggled to define Bradbury’s appeal. Perhaps part of the answer is the fact that he is difficult to classify. He writes science fiction, but he also writes fantasy and horror ... and, he is totally unlike other science fiction/horror/fantasy writers. What makes the difference? I think it is language. Bradbury is a poet who writes prose.

And there is something else, too. From the time I was 15 years old, I knew that his ability to write was like alchemy. He can take a noun and attach a verb to it and clothe them with adjectives and adverbs and when the reader read the sentence, it was (is) magic. How did he do that? These are merely words, but when a master orders them, it is like the bolt of lightning that surges through Dr. Frankenstein’s monster. A catalyst is created, and readers find that their own blood quickens, their senses awaken and they feel what Ray Bradbury intended  a sense of wonder and sometimes a fission in their neck hairs. How did he do that? Let me quote you a (very long) sentence from the Prologue of this novel, describing the ancient mummy in the attic:

She stood propped in a dark corner like an ancient dried plum tree, or an abandoned and scorched ironing board, her hands and wrists trussed across her dry riverbed bosom, a captive of time, her eyes slits of deep blue lapis lazuli behind thread-sewn lids, a glitter of remembrance as her mouth, with a shriveled tongue wormed in it, whistled and signed and whispered to recall every hour of every lost night four thousand years back when she was a pharaoh’s daughter dressed in spider linens and warm-breath silks with jewels burning her wrists as she ran in the marble gardens to watch the pyramids erupt in the fiery Egyptian air.

Oh, to write like that!

There are familiar themes here that resonate like musical chords that were first heard in a Bradbury story 40 years ago. I first encountered Cecy in a story called “The April Witch” and the animated hieroglyphs on the mummy’s breast are reminiscent of the tattoos on The Illustrated Man.

Indeed, much in From the Dust Returned had its beginning in a former story. Bradbury has a genius for creating vehicles which contain numerous unrelated parts. In Something Wicked This Way Comes, a dark, mysterious carnival houses a dozen stories and in The Martian Chronicles, attempts to reach, colonize and survive on a alien world creates a strange, poetic history. In The Illustrated Man, the vehicle is tattooed skin of a tormented sleeper. This time it is a house in October County where the weird and downright inconceivable beings of this world gather for a “homecoming” each October.

The dominant theme in From the Dust Returned is the loss of the supernatural. As the world changes, the forces of the imagination dwindle and retreat. Like Peter Pan, they cannot survive unless the world believes in them ... In one wonderful sequence, a fading ghost is revived by hearing passages from Hamlet (Hamlet’s father’s ghost) and stories from Poe and Dickens. In turn, the ghost is stricken by hearing discussions of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Bradbury’s message is simple. Humanity needs to dream, to believe in the inconceivable. Our hearts are uplifted by illusion and by a need to perceive the world, not as it is, but as it could be. Somewhere in October County, the remains of the mysterious house survive. Fire, torches and the merciless probing of sunlight have reduced it to ruin, and the forces of the supernatural are scattered, hiding in remote cemeteries, churches and abandoned buildings. Perhaps they will perish. Perhaps they will regroup, communicate with cryptic signs and slowly begin to build a refuge ... a secret sanctuary where the fey, alien and misshapen can thrive again. Perhaps they will return to October County ... and rebuild the house.

Finally, there is yet another reason why readers are drawn to Bradbury’s writings. All of his creations share a common bond. Whether it be the new colonists on Mars staring at the image of the ravaged Earth or the freaks of The Dark Carnival, and the night-waking inhabitants of From the Dust Returned, each tale is finally the same — it is a facet of the reflection of the darkness and the light in our own human hearts.

(Gary Carden is a writer, storyteller and lecturer whose book, Mason Jars in the Flood, was recently named Book of the Year by the Appalachian Writers Association. He can be reached at gcarden498@aol.com.)