Ray Bradbury's 'GRIM REAPER'

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?

THE HORROR

The power of telling a story inside a genre is the power to attract the masses. When I hear self-styled “artists” balk at confining themselves to a genre, I balk at them. Dickens did it. Shakespeare did it. The Old Testament authors did it. But genre is too pedestrian for you?

Genre is powerful. And the horror genre is unique in its promise to provide truly unbridled emotion. It is literary life or death. Some will live and some will die. Can’t say that about most tween coming-of-age stories.

Bradbury’s Grim Reaper raises a blade above the world, and brings it crashing down, again and again, slicing through the “green” and “ripe” alike: the young and old. Bringing death. Indiscriminate. The blade singing. Crimson wet. There’s no mistaking the genre that Bradbury has chosen to tell this short tale. The passage is a half-page of horror.

REAL EVIL

The first paragraph’s dark poetry might give a thrill, but the author soon ties our feet to the ground, invoking the real life horrors at Belsen and Buchenwald. We’re not off in some fantasy world where analogy blunts the pain of evil. The horrors are real. And when Bradbury wrote this, a decade had elapsed since the end of the Second World War. A period short enough to still be painful. Long enough to forget. Bradbury didn’t want anyone to forget.

THE VILLAIN

The Grim Reaper is oft depicted as a faceless force of death, a bedside apparition waiting to strike down the old and weak and marked. The dark minion of the Dark One, sent to execute orders writ in blood.

Not Bradbury’s Reaper.

“Sobbing wildly” are the first two words read, revealing the Reaper to be hurt beyond help, a tortured soul drowning in anguish and grabbing at the surface of the world.

With a sickle.

And after the world was ravaged at London and Buchenwald and Hiroshima, “the blade went on” with an inexhaustible fury, fueled by loss. A hurt man “who has lost and lost so much that he no longer cares what he does to the world.”

Bradbury takes a faceless phantom and makes him a deeply hurting human. It’s this extreme emotion that attracts me, and so many others, to the horror genre, not some irresponsible interest in sadism and morbidity. The love of the genre is about extreme empathy (as Joe Hill so eloquently said), and not only for the victims: for everyone. Killers included.

Bernard Rose’s Candyman is one of the greatest horror films of all time precisely because it embraces this. Candyman isn’t some faceless apparition, he is the deeply hurt Daniel Robitaille, a man who was himself victimized for loving. His story is a tragedy, and like Bradbury’s Reaper, he exacts his rage upon the world. Even while he’s committing unspeakable atrocities, it’s very hard not to empathize with him (due in no small part to Tony Todd’s beautiful performance). This extreme empathy, even for the enemy, reminds me of something Louise Erdrich wrote: that hate is injured love.

CHALLENGING EMPATHY

During World War II, that kind of empathy was in short supply, and I think that was part of Bradbury’s point. Writing this makes me wonder where we’re lacking empathy today. Where I’m lacking empathy.

Some would argue that there are enemies not worthy of any empathy at all. Their crimes so absolutely evil, they are no longer human. There are some people in my own life I feel the urge to place in this category.

But Bradbury’s Grim Reaper is a warning against exploring such urges. His Reaper has lost and lost so much “that he no longer cares” what he does to the world. That is, he has lost his ability to empathize.

The passage says the Reaper “lost and lost so much.” I’m left wondering what those losses were. How much agency he had. Did he “lose” relationships that could have been found again? Did he lock doors that could have been reopened? Did he stoke fires that could have been quenched? At some point in life, we all end up in the hospital. The question is this: are you going to leave before you’re healed?

The danger isn’t in feeling pain and suffering. The danger is in no longer caring. When we cease to care for others, we eventually lose the ability to care about ourselves, and the blade goes on, rising, crashing, severing. With fury and rage.

THE FOUNDATION

My connection with Bradbury is likely very easy to explain. I must have read The October Country at some point during my many childhood deep dives into the bookshelves at the Jones Creek Library. As well as The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451. I was reading so much at that point, it’s inevitable that I’ve forgotten the names of books I breezed through. But the Bradbury seeds were planted and, boy, did I ever feed them in the years that followed. I bought much of my fertilizer off the horror shelf at Blockbuster with brand names like King and Carpenter and Cronenberg. Those names are special to me, too.

But Bradbury’s work is still special among them. As I actively seek to grow as a writer, The October Country and The Illustrated Man are books I return to for attunement. Not in the way Meeker used the term. But in the way Kierkegaard used it. Kierkegaard used art as the conduit for his philosophical work. Like the other existentialists, he knew that conveying philosophy through art was powerful because it infused ideas with emotion. Feeling was the price of admission.

Kierkegaard’s attunement in Fear and Trembling is meant to disarm us. To tear down the walls we built up in order to operate in an unfeeling world. Bradbury does this, too, throughout his work, but I would say that it is especially effective in his more macabre stories. And that’s why I return to him when I want to recalibrate the core of my artistic instincts.

At its best, horror is an art form that exercises our empathy. And Bradbury is Beethoven.