Introduction

Ray Bradbury’s interconnected series of seven short stories about the Elliott Family were published between 1946 and 1994, and ultimately combined in 2001 in the fix-up novel From the Dust Returned. Bradbury’s Elliott Family tales are preoccupied with themes of family, belonging and interpersonal relationships. The eponymous Elliotts are a monstrous family of vampires, witches and assorted ghouls who live in a large mansion in the rural Midwest. Each story, featuring one or more of the Elliotts and drenched in the iconography of the Gothic, tends to deal primarily with broader issues of selfhood, love, prejudice and longing. In his Elliott Family stories, Bradbury engages with this ubiquitous vision of the post-war nuclear family, but infuses it with the aesthetics and thematic preoccupations of Gothic horror. Consequently, Bradbury’s fiction remains consistent with the sub-genre of horror often referred to as “Family Gothic”.