From the Dust Returned: a Family Remembrance is a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury written over the course of 50 plus years. Fleshed out and strung together in 2001, the resulting narrative is both Gothic and ghostly, the poetic style departing from Martian chronicle mode, but the spirit retaining a melancholy rumination on death and love that make the best Bradbury so touching. The Family in a story is an unnamed mix of creatures and immortals with supernatural abilities who, having haunted the world over, find themselves "dying" in a cynical modern world. For safe haven they retreat to the safety of an ancestral mansion, a House "beckoned... out of tumults of weather and excursions of Time" by a tree on a hill in an obscure town of Illinois. While the novel is really a lightheartedly macabre series of vignettes, I most enjoyed Bradbury's descriptions of place as character.

"...[the house] was of such magnificence, echoing facades last seen in London, that wagons, intending to the cross the river, hesitated with their families gazing up and decided if this empty place was good enough for a papal palace, a royal monument, or a queen's abode, there hardly seemed a reason to leave. So the wagons stopped, the horses were watered, and when the families looked, they found their shoes as well as their souls had sprouted roots. So stunned were they by the House up there by the lightning-shaped tree, that they feared if they left the House would follow in their dreams and spoil all the waiting places ahead." -- Ray Bradbury