Where We Start From: Hope from the Narthex of the Apocalypse

Jackson the Cat "The Gothic tale, characterized by its setting and atmosphere--the former tending toward ill-storied mansions located in remote, rustic areas, the latter toward gloom and impending disaster--flourished for many years: from the age of Horace Walpole and Anne Radcliffe into the early twentieth century, when it died with Edith Wharton. The genre also typically featured an unlikely, melancholy hero who confronts a half-remembered legend concerning a dark presence who once terrorized the region in life and is still rumored to haunt the land in death, or an innocent who was tortured to death sometime in the distant past and who is said to still walk the land after nightfall." -James Person  From its awkward beginnings in the late 18th century with Horace Walpole's pseudo-medieval novel,  The Castle of Otranto ,  the literary style known as "Gothic"  has grown to become very popular. While there are pure Gothic stories, often elem...

“Beware the autumn people…For some, autumn comes early, stays late through life…For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir in their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eyes? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles- breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them.” – Ray Bradbury, “Something Wicked This Way Comes”

Ray Bradbury wrote many, many short stories, and several novels. From the Dust Returned is one of his "fix-up" novels, created by stitching together short stories that are loosely related, sometimes altering elements of the stories to make them fit better with each other. Despite its Frankenstein's-Monster origins, this is one of Bradbury's masterpieces, a five-star novel. The 2001 hardback edition is covered by a dust jacket with artwork done by Charles Addams, a friend of Bradbury's, and the father of The Addams Family. This illustration was included with "Homecoming," which was a stand-alone short story in Mademoiselle magazine in October, 1946, and is Chapter Nine in the novel. The beauty of this novel lies in the richness of the prose, the humanity of the non-human (but for one member) Elliott Family of rural Illinois, and the macabre and grim atmosphere that haunts each page. Elliott Family members include Cecy, an astral-projecti...