Some years ago, I plucked a paperback from the dusty shelves of a thrift store in New Orleans. Ray Bradbury was a name I knew well, thanks to a public school education that steeped all students in Fahrenheit 451. But this book I’d never read. It was called The October Country.

Peeling back the cover, my eyes landed on the first page’s black type. Not page one. The first page. Before the title page, the foreword, the publisher’s details, was a first page half filled with text. It was entitled, “The Grim Reaper.”

Sobbing wildly, he rose above the grain and hewed to left and right over and over and over! He sliced out huge scars in green wheat and ripe wheat, with no selection and no care, cursing, swearing, the blade swinging up in the sun and falling with a singing whistle!

Bombs shattered London, Moscow, and Tokyo. The kilns of Belsen and Buchenwald took fire.

The blade sang, crimson wet.

Mushrooms vomited out blind suns at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The grain wept in a green rain, falling.

Korea, Indo-China, Egypt, India trembled; Asia stirred, Africa woke in the night...

And the blade went on rising, crashing, severing, with the fury and the rage of a man who has lost and lost so much that he no longer cares what he does to the world.

A fragile warmth washed over me as I read Bradbury’s words. I’d read them before, some decades ago as a child, but that was the easily realization. More difficult was articulating why the words felt so familiar. I’ve re-read books before. This wasn’t that. It was far more foundational. It was the feeling that I had written the words. In truth, I’ve re-read some of my own work and felt less ownership of it.

Was there something that linked Bradbury and I? Superficially, yes. Bradbury was half-Swedish, and I a half-Cajun mudblood. But we’re both half-English. There might be something baked into our DNA. An affinity for similar syntax, for example. Not to mention it’s DNA descended from the creators of our native tongue. I was born only a few hours from his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, and we both spent a few years in Tucson, Arizona.

We were both raised in Baptist churches. We were both raised on HG Wells and Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. We both had an early affinity for the horror genre. Bradbury focused on it exclusively until he was 18. And we both loved movies. Yet Bradbury was born some sixty-plus years before me. Our upbringings could not have been that similar.

Comparing myself to Bradbury at all seems, at best, stupid. So, what is it about The Grim Reaper itself that reached out to me?