The Next in Line.docx

“The Next in Line”

Now it’s time to look at our last Bradbury
short story for this Module—“The Next in
Line.” This story was written in 1946, the
last story Bradbury would write for his
forthcoming collection, Dark Carnival. Ray
had signed a contract on the book with
Suak City, Wisconsin publisher, Arkham
House, but was adding stories up until the
very point of publication. He was growing
and maturing at an amazing clip. He was
publishing short stories in the finest literary
publications in America by the time he
wrote “The Next in Line.” He had published
in The New Yorker and had been selected
for “the Best Short Stories of the Year,”
anthology—the Oscars of short fiction.

Again, you must have witnessed the stylistic and thematic differences
between “The Next in Line” and stories such as “The Lake” and “The
Crowd.” In just four years, Bradbury had matured as writer, moving
from his well-earned and most-apt title as “the poet of the pulps,” to
becoming a bonafide literary sensation. By the age of 26, the New
York literary establishment had embraced Bradbury. Still living at
home with his parents in Venice, California, still sleeping in the same
bed as his older brother “Skip,” Ray was invited to New York by the
editors of Mademoiselle, the fashion and literary magazine. He
traveled to New York City by train in September 1946 and rubbed
shoulders with literary powerhouses such as Carson McCullers, Gore
Vidal, and famed New Yorker cartoonist Charles Adams. He had
arrived. At this same time, he wrote “The Next in Line.”

I interviewed Ray Bradbury for Playboy, for a Halloween story on the
“Psychology of Fear.” I asked him, looking over his entire body of
work, what he considered his most frightening story.

His answer?

“The Next in Line.”

“The Next in Line” is a story of dark marital discord set in the central
Mexico colonial enclave of Guanajuato, Mexico. A young married
couple traveling through the jungle-wilds of Mexico in the 1940s
experience automobile trouble and spend the night in the quaint, yet
strangely disarming colonial city of Guanajuato. Death imagery is
sewn throughout the story. From the funeral procession through the
cobblestones streets, to the Day of the Dead imagery, to the cemetery
and the famed “Mummies of Guanajuato.”

Yep, this story is based yet again on reality. The Mummies of
Guanajuato are real. Bodies dug up from a nearby cemetery because
the families did not pay their funeral dues. Bodies that were naturally
and perfectly preserved by an unprecedented convergence of perfect
natural soil and climate conditions.

When Ray Bradbury was 25, his friend, Grant Beach, invited him to
drive down from Los Angeles to Mexico. Their 8000-mile TK, 8 week
TK journey, brought them through Guanajuato. Ray and his friend
were bickering. Ray didn't drive and his friend was rode-weary and
resentful. They were tired of one another. Their car broke down and
required service and they spent the night in Guanajuato. It was here
that Ray experienced the funeral procession depicted in his short
story, and they visited the catacombs housing the strung up bodies of
the exhumed. Ray looked at the tortured faces of the deceased, lined
up along the catacomb walls, and feared deeply that he could be next.

And there is the origin of the story.

*Tangent alert!

Okay, so Ray turned the bickering couple into a married couple. And
while there was no murder involved, upon leaving Mexico, Ray’s
friend Grant Beach was so tired of his non-driving, needy friend, that
he took Ray Bradbury’s typewriter, which he taken with him on the
trip, and threw it in a river.

To this day, the hulking rusted mass of Ray Bradbury’s earliest
typewriter rests somewhere at the bottom, somewhere, of an Arizona
River.