Behind the Book: Grim

The book began on a hill. The first scene I wrote was a man at Golgotha, watching the crucifixion, and then being killed and robbed by the Roman soldiers on that hill. It took a while to get right, and everything else grew outward from it.

It started because of another book. Years ago I read Michael Moorcock’s Behold the Man, in which a modern man travels back in time to witness the crucifixion, finds the historical Jesus cannot fulfill the role, and ends up taking his place on the cross. That novel fascinated me. The crucifixion, and the question of what it means, stayed with me, and I wanted to write my own story set on that hill. It began as a short story about a witness there, a grieving man whose village suffers under plague and Roman taxes, who comes to the cross demanding to know why the righteous suffer, and is killed for being in the wrong place. The reaper came later. I added Grim, and the short story became something much larger.

What is Grim, and what does he do?

Grim is a reaper. He may or may not come to you when you die; that depends on the circumstances. But here is the mechanism the whole book runs on: he cannot take you and judge you until your body is completely gone. The intact body anchors you in place. Until it has fully decayed or been destroyed, you wait.

When the body is finally gone, Grim judges you: you go on, or you stay. He does not know where “on” leads; nobody does, not even him. Staying means, in effect, being reincarnated, sent back to try again. That is the simple version of what he does, repeated across the whole span of existence.

The unsettling part is what the anchoring implies. If your body is destroyed at once, cremated, lost in a fire, you are released almost immediately. If it decays slowly on a ridge, you wait years, aware of every stage of it. And if you are a pharaoh, mummified and sealed in a tomb, your body preserved for thousands of years, then you are anchored for thousands of years before Grim can come. How your remains are treated decides how long your soul is held in place. The book runs the full length of that spectrum, from the instant release of fire to the near-eternal waiting of the preserved, and it is one of the strangest and most original ideas I have built a book around.

What is it like to write death from the inside, again and again?

Nearly every chapter is a person dying, told from within, and no two deaths are the same. An ice-age hunter freezing alone on a ridge, the last of his people, his body then taken apart across forty years by frost and birds until he is woven into a nest. A man on the hill at Golgotha. A humanitarian driver bleeding out in a truck in a war he will not name, thinking about the shipment of flour he got through. A victim on an altar stone asking, plainly and without begging, whether the heart goes anywhere. Each one is a whole life arriving at its end, and each one had to be its own complete thing before Grim ever entered it.

What I kept finding, writing them, is that the interesting thing at the end is rarely fear, or rarely fear by itself. It is what people reach for. The morning someone did not know was a good morning until later. A question they never asked and now never will. The plain statement, said the way you say something to a person beside you in the dark, not asking them to fix it, just telling them what is true. Writing death honestly meant refusing both the clean death painted on temple walls and the purely gruesome one. It meant staying with the specific human being for the whole length of their ending, and letting the fear and the dignity and the small unfinished business all be there at once, because that is what the end of a life holds.

Why is the book not in chronological order?

Because it is told in the order Grim experiences it, not the order humans would lay history out. A death from the ice age sits beside the crucifixion sits beside a modern war, because that is the sequence the reaper moves through, and the reaper does not move along our timeline. Nearly every chapter is a death, and each one is told from inside the person dying, their last hours, their fear, what they were thinking about at the end. The reader moves through human history the way Grim does, by its endings, out of order, one life at a time.

And Grim is not alone. There are more than one of him. Millions, working across all of time, for as long as the universe has existed. The book only hints at this. On the hill at Golgotha, more than one reaper comes, because a death that matters draws them, and Grim notes, once and without elaboration, exactly why he is there and who is on the center cross. It is a hint dropped and never pressed. The scale of what Grim is part of stays mostly offstage, felt instead of explained.

What is the book really about?

The judging and the anchoring are just the mechanism, the premise the reader is handed early. The real story is what Grim starts to notice as he does this work across the entire span of existence: that things are not what they seem. That something in the arrangement he serves is not real. He begins, slowly, over an unimaginable length of time and an uncountable number of deaths, to learn what is true underneath the system he has always taken for granted.

So the book is not a tour of death, and it does not set out to muse on dying, though it contains a great deal of both. It is a reaper gradually realizing that the cycle he administers, the judgment, the going on, the staying, is hiding something, and following that thread as far as it goes. The deaths are the texture. The discovery is the spine. What he finds at the end is the point, and it is bigger than the cycle he thought he understood.

I will not say what he finds. But the book reaches past the personal question everyone brings to death, does it go somewhere, and toward a much larger one about what all of this dying is for, whether the endless cycle of lives and judgments is the whole of it or only the surface of something else. Grim has been doing this since the beginning, across every century and every kind of death, and that vantage lets the book ask the question at a scale no single human life could ever hold. The victim on the altar stone asks it small: does the heart go somewhere. The end of the book asks it as large as it can be asked.

How does it fit with your other books?

It is the most metaphysically ambitious thing I have written, and it comes from the same instinct as the rest of my fiction: writing from a viewpoint that is not my own. A cat in Buttercup. A galaxy in Collision with Andromeda. An artificial mind in Peacekeeper. Prehistoric people in Family on Ice. Grim is a viewpoint that stands outside human life entirely and watches it end, over and over, across all of history, which let me write about death from the one angle a living writer never gets: from the side that stays.

It also grew the way my largest books grow, by dropping scenes and letting them find each other. I wrote the crucifixion, then another death, then another, each one its own complete thing, and only later assembled them into the order Grim would live them. The book found its shape the same way Grim finds his understanding, one death at a time, until the pattern underneath finally becomes visible.

Frequently Asked Questions