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.

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.