Book Three, Chapter Two
“Rawhead Rex”
If I had to recommend one story from The Books of Blood to horror fandom in general, this would be it. Werewolf fans, Grendel fans, Frankenstein or Bigfoot or orc or troll or Jason or Alien or whatever fans–stop what you’re doing, click on that Amazon link at the end of this post, buy Books of Blood Vols. 1-3, and the second you receive it, read “Rawhead Rex” immediately. You will never find a better monster-run-amok story no matter how hard you look.
The plot is pure simplicity–in an English country village slowly being overrun by tourists, a local yokel unearths a 9-foot-tall monster that kills and eats people, especially children. This monster–Rawhead, it’s called; also the King (hence the “Rex” of the title)–proceeds to do exactly that, in abundance. That’s pretty much it. GodDAMN is it great.
The genius of the story lies in the absolute, single-minded savagery with which Barker chronicles the rampage. For example, when I said Rawhead eats children, I was not fucking around. The totality with which the concept of the family is violated in this story is breathtaking–children are yanked from parents’ arms and devoured right in front of them, they’re yanked out of the family car and vomit down the creature’s head as he bites their faces off while the parents look on, helpless. It’s unbelievably gruesome, and powerful. Church and Law offer no more protection than Family, either.
The story’s full of the sort of primal-fear, fight-or-flight-inspiring images that kicked off “The Skins of the Fathers,” with this enormous angry monster bursting down doors, smashing through windows, running down the High Street destroying everything in sight. It puts that cold fear in your gut that you’d get if you went to take out the garbage and found yourself five feet away from a grizzly bear–only worse, because when the eyes of this beast find you they’re full of a horrible self-awareness, hatred as well as hunger. Actually, they’re filled with joy. Rawhead loves what he does.
As becomes apparent, thematically speaking, as the story unfolds, Barker’s original idea for Rawhead was of a giant killer penis. As such “Rawhead Rex” is one of Barker’s most searing explorations of gender politics (one of his favorite topics to tackle through horror, thus far most explicitly in “Dread,” “The Skins of the Fathers,” “Jacqueline Ess,” and “Son of Celluloid”; the sex act, of course, is virtually omnipresent throughout the entire anthology).
And there are the usual razor-sharp prose moments, of course, my favorite being when a newly bereaved father can no longer cry: “This time the tears didn’t begin. This time there was just an anger that was almost wonderful.”
Even some of Barker’s more problematic recurring tropes are rock-solid here. Take the quiet, almost curious–indeed, almost welcoming–resignation many of his characters feel immediately before being dispatched by some hideous creature or other: I often find it if not difficult to believe then at least demanding of more explanation than Barker’s willing to give it (cf. Ricky in “Son of Celluloid,” for example), but here he ponies up a convincing argument in its favor: “[He] just stood and watched. There was nothing in him but awe. Fear was for those who still had a chance of life: he had none.” If horror is hopelessness (and I see I’m not alone in thinking that), then this is horror at its purest.
“Rawhead Rex” is probably best known for its legendarily awful movie adaptation, which is a real shame, because it would make an excellent horror movie, albeit dark as anything this side of the original Texas Chain Saw, and Rawhead would make an unforgettable monster. With his orcs (and especially) his Uruk-Hai, Peter Jackson proved that (much as he proved the filmability of Lovecraft with his Watcher in the Water). Meanwhile, Steven Bissette’s never-realized graphic-novel version trumped the one that did see print, by Steve Niles and Les Edwards. But the best version, I assure you, is in your head. Go unleash it.
