Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).
The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".
One thought I had was that this story, instead of being creepy, could have been more black humour, particularly what our protagonist gets up to in his office. He happens to be an undertaker, but he also happens to hate people, so he gets his revenge on them when preparing their corpses. Like, he embalms a racist with black ink, and fills the head of a woman with whipped cream. This gets even more outlandish when they start closing the coffins.
Anyway, the problem is that people who land up in the morgue aren’t always dead – apparently, that was what the wake as all about, if somebody had been mistakenly assumed to be dead, but they weren’t - like they were in a coma.
Well, as I mentioned, the dead don’t always stay dead, or at least people who land up in the morgue aren’t always supposed to be there, and of course, our undertaker is actually exposed, to an extent. The problem is that in my mind he was taking out revenge on people that he didn’t like, though it is pretty clearly indicated that that basically included everybody.
Still, I thought it was pretty good. Definitely worth checking out, and I’m sure some dark grimey humour could be seen in it.