Dark Carnival
Arkham House, May 1947.

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If this is the first page you've looked at, then you are more than a casual reader of Ray Bradbury's prolific output. Dark Carnival is legend. Published in 1947 by August Derleth's Arkham House, the publishing house created for keeping alive the spirit of H. P. Lovecraft...blah, blah, blah.... You already knew that stuff. The book is long out of print, and you want to know what you're missing. Well, then. Fire up your Mechanical Hound and send him out sniffing. There were only about 3000 copies printed, but many libraries still have Dark Carnival among their moldering stacks--and some of them will even loan the book out. Use the Internet, use a librarian (gently), use inter-library loan, but please don't mark up the pages if and when you get the book into your grubby little hands.

Gauntlet Publications issued a deluxe limited edition of Dark Carnival in 2001. Pricey to begin with, this out-of-print volume now commands a king's ransom on Amazon Marketplace. Before you sell your motorcycle on eBay to raise funds for the purchase, you might want to know a bit more about these elusive books.

The Arkham House original contains 27 stories, no introduction, no afterword, and no illustrations. All but four of these stories can be easily found in Bradbury's other collections. Of the four rarities, only "Reunion" is a proper story. The other three are sketch-like mood pieces. ("The Maiden," "Interim," and "The Night Sets.") None of these are anywhere near classic status, and only a mindlessly obsessive fan would find them worth the price of admission.

Fifteen of the better stories were later revised in The October Country, a satisfying collection that will likely never go out of print--even when used copies are so numerous that Amazon lists them for a penny each.

The Gauntlet limited edition is like a DVD packed with extras. There are three introductions by editor Donn Albright, textual detective Jon Eller, and Bradbury himself. Eller's "Dark Carnival: A History" provides the lowdown on the convoluted paths these stories have taken through Bradbury's career. Albright and Bradbury provide brief memoirs of their own experiences with Dark Carnival. Each story is preceded by a comment from Bradbury and a black-and-white thumbnail of the magazine issue which contained the story.

The Gauntlet book includes four "lost stories" from the pages of Weird Tales, none of which had ever appeared in any previous Bradbury collection. All four stories have since been collected in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. That volume contains the same versions and is much easier to find. The stories are:

• "The Sea Shell"
• "Bang! You’re Dead"
• "The Poems"
• "The Watchers"

Gauntlet also includes a brief afterword by Clive Barker and a section of archival materials from Bradbury's files. These are facsimiles of typewritten pages ranging from correspondence with publishers to an outline for a Dark Carnival ballet. All told, it's a handsome volume wrapped in a cover painting by the multi-talented Mr. Bradbury, but this edition is no more available than the original. Happy hunting!

The entries below include plot summaries, radio and television reviews, revision details and hints for finding some of those "lost stories" that failed to appear for decades.

Summary: The Elliot Family is having a homecoming. Vampires, werewolves, and other nocturnal relations are converging on the House in Upper Illinois for a rare party. But fourteen-year-old Timothy feels left out because he’s the only "normal" one in the Family--a sort of white sheep in an all black flock.

Comments: "Homecoming" has been revised numerous times for different publications. Dark Carnival features the longest version, but not necessarily the best. The October Country version omits a few of the original parlor games and shortens up some of the less important asides. Both versions take place in Mellin Town, Illinois, and feature a fourteen-year-old Timothy. At least one change could cause readers some confusion. In The October Country, the Elliot sisters are described as hanging more wolfsbane among the black crepe decorations. This would surely ruin the evening for many of the more toothsome guests. The earlier Dark Carnival version reveals that this is only fake wolfsbane, a prank to frighten Uncle Einar.

The most heavily revised version of "Homecoming" appears as a chapter in the patchwork novel From the Dust Returned. Much of the material is completely rewritten without changing the basic story. Bradbury supplies many new descriptive passages, the best of which involves the winged Uncle Einar taking Timothy for a ride over the rooftops. The Elliot family now lives in Green Town, Illinois, and Tim is only ten. Many changes were made to bring the Elliot family stories together into a novel, but the removal of scenes and siblings gives this "Homecoming" a jumpy, uneven feel. However, the novel does reinstate a number of details from Dark Carnival that were omitted from The October Country. Ultimately, each reader must decide which version of "Homecoming" is the real party.

In 2006, HarperCollins published "The Homecoming" as part of the Wonderfully Illustrated Short Pieces series. The artwork is by Dave McKean, and the text is the chapter version from the novel From the Dust Returned. While that version has merit within the context of the novel, it is not the best choice for a stand-alone short story. The wrap-around cover art is a remake of the painting Charles Addams made for the Mademoiselle issue, but the rest of McKean’s illustrations are not that wonderful. They have the "messy-equals-creepy" style I’ve seen in so many other places. This book will appeal to kids who spend too much time watching The Cartoon Network, but adult fans will be less than enthusiastic. Bradbury’s "The Traveler" describes Cecy’s "slight, exquisitely sculptured head." McKean turns her into a bubble-headed, squinty-eyed Goth chick on heroin. There have been better Elliot Family illustrations. See Jerry Weist's book Bradbury: An Illustrated Life.

See also:

• "Uncle Einar"
• "The Traveler"
• "The April Witch"
• "West of October"
• From the Dust Returned

Summary: Mr. Harris is a hypochondriac who thinks there is something wrong with his bones. After a prolonged battle of wills with his own skeleton, Harris calls in a bizarre specialist named M. Munigant.

Comments: Bradbury’s tales often start with a very simple idea (skeletons are a frightening symbol of horror), and then push it to the edge (therefore we should be terrified to have one inside us.) No, not really. Mr. Harris is a bonehead to worry about it, and we don't feel one bit sorry for him.

This idea first appeared in a much shorter version that was mostly dialog.

Ray Bradbury Theater #8 stars Eugene Levy.

"It was one of those things they keep in a jar in the tent of a sideshow on the outskirts of a little, drowsy town. One of those pale things drifting in alcohol plasma..."

Summary: A farmer named Charlie buys a mysterious jar from a carnival sideshow and displays it in his living room for all to see, thus turning his home into a gathering place for gawkers to sit and speculate on the jar’s murky contents. Owning the jar gives Charlie a new sense of respect among the locals and makes his wife Thedy jealous.

Comments: Obviously, Weird Tales was before my time, but I’ve read a good number of "weird" anthologies, and to me "The Jar" is the model Weird Tales story. It’s stories like this that influenced Stephen King so strongly: the half dumb, half clever hillbilly character, his sluttish wife, the whole "thing bobbing in a jar" creepiness, and the sinister twist ending. I’m surprised this hasn’t been adapted into comic book form.

Television: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour presented "The Jar" on February 14, 1964 (season 2, episode 17). The teleplay by James Bridges is almost entirely faithful to the original story, with just one new plot element to flesh out the hour and add some action. The casting is excellent, especially Collin Wilcox (so memorable as Mayella Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird) as Thedy. Slim Pickens plays a sheriff character, and Billy Barty is the carny man. Some viewers may find the acting a bit overdone here and there, but this type of story requires a tongue-in-cheek characterization of local yokels. The only real flaw here is that the ending goes one step too far by revealing the jar's final secret to all of the characters. That shock should have been reserved for villain Tom Carmody alone (with a sly wink to viewers like you).

Hitchcock’s series was revived in the 1980s, and "The Jar" was among the remakes. Tim Burton directed this version, which I’ve seen and only vaguely remember. I seem to recall the man finding the jar in an art gallery.

Ray Bradbury Theater #45 also left little impression on me. I believe it keeps the swampy setting of the original and uses a revealing tattoo as a plot point.

Summary: Harold and Margaret take their delayed honeymoon back East, where Harold has a haunting experience on the beach where his childhood sweetheart Tally drowned many years before.

Comments: This is classic Bradbury. The end-of-summer sadness of the beach scenes is terrifically evocative. Setting and subject are woven into a short, seamless theme of deathless love. Affecting without being sentimental. In "Drunk, and In Charge of a Bicycle," the author tells how at age twenty-two he finished this story with tears running down his face, because he knew he’d just written his first good story. Dark Carnival features an earlier version than other collections. The ominous opening paragraph is the only major change in the later versions and is clearly an improvement over the earlier innocuous one.

Ray Bradbury Theater #21

Radio: NBC's Radio City Playhouse #56 stars Fred Collins. Collins was normally an NBC announcer, and "The Lake" was his first starring role, but the majority of his acting is just narration anyway. The other half of this "duet" episode features "Collector's Item" by Roald Dahl, a story that Quentin Tarantino ripped off in the movie Four Rooms.

See also: More beach-front love and loss can be found in these superb stories.

• "The Shoreline at Sunset"
• "The Picasso Summer"
• "Long After Midnight"
• "The Fog Horn"

Summary: Sometimes a man will refer to his wife as a battle-axe. In this one-pager, an executioner has a brief affair with a guillotine.

Comments: In the Gauntlet Limited Edition of Dark Carnival, Bradbury explains that this was inspired by reading "French semi-poets" like Saint-John Perse. He calls the story "a smart-ass experiment with obvious metaphoring."

Summary: Leota wasn’t enjoying the road trip with her Okie husband Walter to begin with, and now the bumpkin expects her to spend the night in a rented room where the previous tenant has left behind a tombstone.

Comments: A story full of irony and too many coincidences. This was adapted as the 65th and final episode of Ray Bradbury Theater. It stars Shelley Duvall and it's pretty bad.

Summary: Aunt Rose, Uncle Dimity, and the children are quiet now, sitting at the dinner table without so much as a word between them. But Mr. Greppin remembers how they laughed two weeks ago when he announced his intention to marry Alice Jane Ballard--and how he made them smile.

Comments: In the Gauntlet edition of Dark Carnival, Ray Bradbury comments, "I think it was just one of those stories, like most of mine, I never know how they are going to end." Well, this story’s shock ending is fairly predictable. It’s a type of story generally frowned upon in the publishing business because it relies on an unfair point-of-view, withholding information that the reader would obviously see if he were there in the story. It could never be filmed for the same reason.

Is this a Green Town story? The town is not named, but there's a brothel with a pink-curtained window across the ravine. A scene in Something Wicked This Way Comes shows the boy protagonists peeping in a window of what may be a brothel. However, the brothel reference and many other sexual passages are omitted in the Bradbury Stories appearance of "The Smiling People." Both versions imply that Mr. Greppin is a frustrated virgin, but the Dark Carnival version does more to establish Aunt Rose's prudishness as a motivation for his rage.

Don't confuse "The Smiling People" with "The Smile."

Summary: Martin Smith--10 years old and confined to bed--lives his life through his dog, sending him out into the world to dig up treasures and bring back visitors. With Dog’s help Martin might even get over the death of his pretty school teacher, Miss Haight.

Comments: In my secondhand copy of The October Country the previous owner has written EXCELLENT beside this title in the table of contents. The October version is certainly superior to the earlier draft found in Dark Carnival. Bradbury has added just enough description of Miss Haight's visits to bring her to life. In DC she’s a less vivid character mentioned on one page and dead on the next. There's no mention of her being Martin's teacher. Both versions mention the ravine, and October adds a character named Mr. Holloway. He's not the same Holloway from Something Wicked, but Green Town seems to be the implied setting.

Ray Bradbury Theater #9 is one of only three episodes I haven't seen.

See also: "The Sea Shell" is also about a bedridden boy looking for a connection to the outer world.

Summary: Another story of the unnatural Elliot Family. Cecy is the traveler who can enter the minds and bodies of others. Uncle Jonn is the hated outcast of the Family who needs Cecy's help to rid himself of an unwanted presence in his mind.

Comments: Dark Carnival and The Stories of Ray Bradbury appear to contain the original version of "The Traveler." The novel From the Dust Returned changes the story in minor ways (John the Terrible instead of Uncle Jonn) and in major ways (why he's feared, how he dies, and hints of consequences in later chapters). The novel implies that John was a bosom buddy of Vlad the Impaler. I believe the ending was changed to make Cecy seem less wicked by comparison. Bradbury has seriously reworked this one to tie the novel together into an overall story arc, but once again he's omitted much of the original tale in the process. Read the original version for more examples and longer descriptions of Cecy's body-switching talents.

Cecy Elliot never quite becomes the great character she should be. Her inconsistencies could have been used to better effect, showing the conflict of being an eternal teenager, both young and ancient--but it never quite comes off that way. Cecy is a fantasized version of Bradbury's beloved Aunt Neva, who as a teenager introduced young Ray to fantasy books and Halloween. Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, tells about Neva's influence on the writer, but Bradbury has published little about her. Weller mentions an unpublished essay about Neva called "The Wingless Bat." The first page of this is reproduced in the Gauntlet edition of Dark Carnival, but it's not nearly enough.

Cecy also:

• "Homecoming"
• "The April Witch"
• "West of October"

Aunt Neva is also fictionalized in "The Burning Man."

Summary: Is it possible for a newborn baby to hate its mother? Does a baby resent being forced from its peaceful womb into the chaotic outside world? Does it want revenge? Alice Leiber thinks so. She thinks her baby is trying to kill her.

Comments: Bradbury repeatedly claims to remember his own birth and circumcision a few days later. (See "Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle.") In the Gauntlet edition of Dark Carnival he says this is because he was a ten-month baby. No one believes this story except for Bradbury, but he's made the most of it with "The Small Assassin."

What is interesting about this story is wondering what happens afterward. If Dr. Jeffers kills the evil baby, how will he convince anyone that the baby murdered the parents? The doctor would be especially suspicious in Ray Bradbury Theater #12 where he finds both parents dead at the same time. In the story, the mother dies the day before the father. Jeffers may draw additional suspicion because he's played by Cyril Cusack, who had previously portrayed the antagonistic fire chief in Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451.

Summary: The same sinister crowd keeps appearing at the scenes of different auto-accidents.

Comments: Creepy story--simple and effective. As a teenager Bradbury witnessed a horrible accident and never learned to drive himself. A detailed account of that fatal wreck serves as introduction to the short story in the Gauntlet limited edition of Dark Carnival.

Ray Bradbury Theater #3 is one of the better, HBO-made shows.

Radio: The Suspense episode is only loosely based on this story. Dana Andrews plays a detective investigating a series of murders where the same man appears in the crowd at each crime scene--a fact he puts together from newspaper photos.

Summary: Hiding in the attic to escape his irritable Aunt Opie, young Malcolm Briar discovers trunks of clothing and bric-a-brac that once belonged to his deceased parents and brother. He spends days obsessively scrutinizing each item in an effort to better know his lost family through the sense-memories imbued therein. His reverie is upset by Aunt Opie’s plans to throw all that junk in her washing machine, making it sterile and anonymous.

Comments: This is the longest of the four rare pieces only available in Dark Carnival. It is the only one that can really be called a proper story, but it isn't a lost classic.

See also: More attic stories.

• "Autumn Afternoon"
• "A Scent of Sarsaparilla"
• "Trapdoor"
• "The Trunk Lady"

Summary: Mr. Benedict almost relishes the scorn and ridicule the townspeople dump on him. Let them have their jokes. If there's anything an undertaker knows it's how to handle people.

Comments: Bradbury Stories contains the same version from the rare Dark Carnival collection.

Ray Bradbury Theater #62 stars Michael J. Pollard, an actor who is weird in anything.

Summary: Meet the Braling brothers. Charlie is the older one, rich from a life as an inventor. Richard is the no-good one, living a life of leisure on Charlie’s money. Charlie's last invention is a special coffin, but Richard suspects something fishy about the casket and has Charlie buried in a plain pine box. Oh, sweet revenge!

Comments: Dark Carnival and The Stories of Ray Bradbury feature the same version of "The Coffin." The story appears in A Memory of Murder as "Wake for the Living." The text varies slightly, but not significantly.

Ray Bradbury Theater #15 is actually better than the original story. The hatred between the brothers is amplified by a backstory of Richard stealing Charlie's true love from him. Several other changes make the story more plausible and comical. One of the more enjoyable episodes.

See also: "Marionettes, Inc." is a different sort of story about Braling versus Braling.

Summary: Mrs. Lattimore gives birth a year after being interred.

Comments: From womb to tomb in just two pages. Bradbury later called this early effort "a sick story by a sick author." But "The Small Assassin" is one of his most collected stories. Apparently, there's a fine line where evil babies are concerned.

Similar titles:

• The Martian Chronicles includes a short bridge passage called "Interim."
• "Time Intervening" was once titled "Interim."

  
  

Summary: Edwin and Mother live alone in a huge house surrounded by forest. This is their Universe. Beyond the trees is only death, like the honking, metallic beasts that killed Edwin’s father. Father, also called God, created the Universe for Edwin and Mother, and one shouldn’t concern oneself with what lies beyond.

Comments: Another story that was rewritten between Dark Carnival (1947) and The October Country (1955). Bradbury corrected some subtle viewpoint problems in the narrative, but the most significant change is that the jack-in-the-box is now in the story proper instead of standing up front as an obvious metaphor.

Edwin. Mother. The mysterious Teacher. These shut-in characters are able to live in a fantasy realm that exists within the real world. Bradbury gives us Edwin's limited but growing viewpoint in a convincing manner that builds up like the tension inside the spring-loaded toy.

Summary: Drew Erickson inherits a farm with a peculiar wheat field, portions of which need to be cut down daily. He has also become the unhappy owner of a special scythe with words on the blade: Who wields me--wields the world!

Comments: The first 500 words of this popular story were written by Leigh Brackett, but you would never guess it. There is no sudden shift in style or quality. The only noticeable change between Dark Carnvial and October Country versions is the number of war references. The original 1943 version mentions Hitler's early victories, while the 1955 version includes references to the concentration camps, mushroom clouds, Hiroshima, and later wars around the world.

The graphic novel V for Vendetta by Alan Moore alludes to a "Bradbury story about the corn." This is most likely an inaccurate reference to "The Scythe."

The phrase Kyrie Eléison is Greek, meaning "Lord have mercy."

Summary: It's been seven years since a classroom tragedy caused Mr. Howard to retire from teaching. When circumstances force him to take a substituting job he returns to the classroom to face down his demons.

Comments: The game of "poison" involves jumping over the squares of sidewalk that have names imprinted in the cement. They are the names of the contractors who paved the sidewalk, but the children claim they are graves. This is a decent story that could have used a rewrite. Unfortunately, "Poison" was not rewritten in the 56 years between Dark Carnival and Bradbury Stories. Both books feature the same text, right down to the same typographical errors. The books have different typeface and layout, but that’s the wonder of modern digital printing. This was probably taken from the same computer file as the Gauntlet edition of DC.

Could this have influenced Stephen King's story "Sometimes They Come Back," where a teacher uses black magic to save himself from evil students? Mr. Howard accuses his students of "necromancy."

Ray Bradbury Theater #49 stars Richard Benjamin as Mr. Howard.

Summary: Green-winged Uncle Einar hits a high tension wire while flying home from the Elliot family Homecoming. He loses his ability to fly at night, but consequently gains a wife, children, and a newfound trick for flying undetected by daylight.

Comments: Another story Bradbury has rewritten a few times. In Dark Carnival Einar and Brunilla are married by a Minister Elliot (a Christian!) with Mother, Father and Laura Elliot as witnesses. The October Country omits these specific characters, and the family's presence is depicted as a fluttering, rustling horde. "The Homecoming" is mentioned in these early versions, but Cecy Elliot is not.

The novel From the Dust Returned features "Uncle Einar" as chapter 15. Cecy figures into this version, which is rewritten to fit the themes of the novel. Bradbury has shortened the story by making Brunilla a widow with children when Einar meets her. These kids have names in the story but are generic in the novel. A few key phrases would indicate that Bradbury worked this up from the original Dark Carnival version.

See also: Elliot family stories.

• "Homecoming"
• "The April Witch"
• "The Traveler"
• "West of October"
• From the Dust Returned

Summary: Allin, a travel writer, believes he learned too much in the Himalayan Valley of the Winds, and now an avenging tempest has pursued him around the world. Besieged in his fortified home, Allin makes several frantic phone calls to his friend Herb Thompson, who is enjoying a perfectly tranquil evening only thirty miles away.

Comments: William Nolan’s Ray Bradbury Companion reproduces the first two pages of the Weird Tales version of "The Wind." The character’s name is John Colt in this early version, which follows the protagonist’s point of view rather than the limited-by-telephone viewpoint of the later book versions.

The story was completely rewritten for Dark Carnival. This familiar version stays at the Thompson residence so that Allin’s plight is heard entirely over the phone. This allows Bradbury to show off his ability for revealing plot through loaded dialog. The technique is effective here, but his later work often suffers from a dialog-drenched style. It is perhaps ironic that these later manuscripts were dictated into the telephone after a stroke limited Bradbury's activity.

Minor changes were made for The October Country to clear up some misused terminology regarding the game of cards Thompson is playing and the variety of storms Allin has narrowly escaped. Someone must have told Bradbury that you don’t discard in blackjack and storms aren’t called hurricanes in the Pacific.

Ray Bradbury Theater #22

Radio: Many of the Bradbury 13 episodes are a mixture of high-end audio production and actors who sound like they’re acting. The actress playing Herb’s bitchy wife sounds like she’s straining to win a Marconi Award. This is still a worthwhile listening experience--one of the best Bradbury audio adaptations.

You are a child in a small town....

Summary: An eight-year-old boy discovers fear when his older brother seems to be lost in the night.

Comments: This is one of the Dark Carnival stories that didn’t make it into The October Country. A revised version can be found in Dandelion Wine as the chapter that begins: The courthouse clock struck nine and it was getting late and it was really night on this small street in a small town.... In the novel the boy is 10-year-old Tom Spaulding, but in the original story it is "you." This second-person, present-tense viewpoint makes "The Night" different from many of Bradbury's stories, and the original version is easily found in The Stories of Ray Bradbury.

Near the end of the story a train whistle blowing out in the country triggers memories of a cousin that died young. Bradbury mentions this childhood association in the interview episode of the Bradbury 13 radio series.

Summary: Aunt Tildy considers death to be an impractical nuisance, and she’s too old and set in her ways to change her philosophy now. Those young men from the mortuary only want her for her body anyway.

Comments: The EC Comics adaptation, available in The Autumn People, is perhaps the most enjoyable version of this odd story.

Ray Bradbury Theater #17: I have said enough negative things about Ray Bradbury Theater, and I'm too old and set in my ways to change my philosophy now.

Radio: Bradbury 13 doesn't help. This story is dead and there's no reviving it.

See also: "Some Live Like Lazarus" and "Death and the Maiden" are also about old women who refuse to die.

Summary: Odd Martin claims he's been dead ever since a flood washed away his farm. But that doesn't bother manicurist Miss Weldon--she doesn't like her men too lively anyway.

Comments: This is one of those Dark Carnival stories that remained out of print for over fifty years. Meanwhile, much ink was wasted reprinting lesser tales. Gauntlet Publications issued an excellent edition of Dark Carnival in 2001, but its print-run and price tag limited its purchase to collectors only. However, "The Dead Man" resurfaced two years later in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales. The story is easier to find in that massive volume, but harder to read. A number of minor touch-up revisions have been made, some of which create typographical and continuity problems in the text. The first paragraph is botched in a way that smacks of digital editing. This is what happens when you replace the ink-smudged typesetter with an antiseptic computer guru who learned English from a cassette tape. Many of the needless changes to the text lead one to wonder if Bradbury had any hand in this at all.

Ray Bradbury Theater #57 isn't too hard to look at. In the Gauntlet book Bradbury calls it a wonderful film.

Summary: The mysterious Mr. Koberman rents a room in the house where eleven-year-old Douglas lives with his grandparents. Koberman carries only copper pennies, eats with wooden cutlery, and sleeps all day. Douglas is beginning to wonder just what sort of work Mr. Koberman does at night.

Comments: Although Green Town, Illinois is not named, there are several details that would indicate this setting. Mrs. Singer's grocery store was first mentioned in "The Night." And young Douglas, whose grandparents run a boarding house, is central to Dandelion Wine. The boarding house has a colored-glass window, a feature that appears in numerous other stories.

Ray Bradbury Theater #11 will stick in your craw.

Summary: Paul tries to convince his friend Matt that he can’t live forever on a studio backlot among the moldering sets. But Matt assures Paul that he’s happier here and more at home than he’d been out there in the real world. Matt turns his back on Paul, proving himself to be a hollow, false friend.

Comments: This two-pager may have been an early seed for "The Meadow."
A Graveyard For Lunatics also comes to mind.

Summary: Two spinster sisters, Anna and Juliet, spend an afternoon sewing and watching the rain come down. Anna tells a dark love story of a man and woman--both dead--who lead a secret life in the storm drains beneath the city.

Comments: Good rainy day reading. The Dark Carnival version is longer and more erotic. The way the floating bodies tumble and press together is more suggestive, and they are naked. Anna also says she saw her old beau Frank peeking at her through the bathtub drain. All of this is shortened or removed in The October Country, which is probably the magazine version.

Summary: Joseph and Marie, an American couple vacationing in Mexico, visit a vault full of mummies in a small town. The experience leaves Marie wanting to get away, but when their car breaks down, they are stuck there two more nights.

Comments: Bradbury traveled to Mexico in the 1940s to collect masks for the Los Angeles County Museum. He stopped in the town of Guanajuato. There he saw the mummies. The Mexican trip would inspire several stories, but "The Next in Line" is the richest of them. It is a longer tale and the payoff hardly seems worth the wait, but there is more here than a simple story with a grim ending. It includes plenty of Bradbury’s trademark prose-poetry passages and some of his darker humor and irony. This makes it more enjoyable than the other lengthy story of a bickering American couple in Mexico: "Interval in Sunlight."

Radio: In 1992 this was produced as an episode of the BBC Fear on Four series. The actor playing Joseph sounds like he's doing his best Henry Fonda impression. Not a member of the British Empire? Try searching for the MP3 instead. More info on Bradbury's radio shows can be found at the Old Time Radio Logs of Frank Passage.

See also:

• The Mummies of Guanajuato by Archie Lieberman. (Mummy photos!)
• "The Lifework of Juan Díaz." (Another story of the mummy vault.)
• "The Fox and the Forest." (Science-fiction in old Mexico.)
• The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury by Sam Weller. (Read more about the Mexico trip.)