On the heels of tonight's staggering shock ending on The Walking Dead, Twitter exploded with a number of Walking Dead-related hashtags. That's not unusual.

Perhaps a little more unusual was the fact that one of the hot, trending topics is John Steinbeck's classic novel Of Mice and Men.

That's because the final scene between Carol and Lizzie is an almost beat-for-beat translation of the novel, in which a man is forced to kill his mentally-handicapped friend and longtime companion, after he kills a woman. The murder had no particular malice, but Lenny, who had been a danger to not only people, but lots of rodents, as the title suggested.

When he knew he had to kill him, George took his friend Lenny out to an isolated location and told him a story of their bright future together...then shot him in the back of the head so that his death would be quick, painless and happy. The "look at the flowers, Lizzie," and "everything happens the way it's supposed to," comments that not only assure Lizzie that things will be alright, evoking her parents and giving her a final happy thought before she pulled the trigger.

Tonight on Talking Dead, host Chris Hardwick even acknowledged the story similarities.

Here's the text from Steinbeck's novella: