"Rawhead Rex"
was definitely an interesting read. I found the world to not be all too
interesting, but Rawhead was a fresh monster in my book of monsters. I read the
copy which has been adapted into the graphic novel, and I'm not sure how I would
have imagined Rawhead to look without the influence of the artwork. I think I
would have seen him in a way that looks like the Cheshire cat, but a little
more pocked in the face since it was described as pitted. I suppose the
paintings in the comic were close to how I envisioned the king as described.
This is my first time
reading anything by Clive Barker, which I'm now learning that he is one of the better-known
horror writers, and I will say that the thing that I liked the most about this
story was his voice. There is one line that I had to stop at, and it stuck with
me throughout the rest of my read. It is so simple, but an image I can see very
clearly in my head. It takes place just after Rawhead kills the ranch family
with the horse.
Rawhead watched sergeant Gissing's car crawl out of the village and along the north road, the headlights making very little impression on the night.
It really is very
simple. It is not necessarily beautiful or poetic, but there is something about
the way he described this scene that made me feel immersed. I'm always
impressed by less is more style of writing. Exact wording, where if any word is
removed the mood is lost. I remember having to talk about this while studying
Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby" in one of many different classes. Not
a fan, personally, probably because every professor seemed to want to work on
this story. But I remember talking about the number of edits before publishing
being somewhere around 16, and people claimed that not a single word could be
removed without ruining the story. I didn't read Rawhead the way I did Gatsby,
but I would assume Barker's story would suffer if anything were removed.
One of the aspects I
liked most was the lore created around the monster which led to his standout weakness,
pregnant women. While this is unique, I think it left some questions for me
about why menstruating women were considered sour to him when a woman
during menstruation can't be pregnant. I felt like this should have been the
women's weak point against Rawhead. If it was better explained and I'm missing
something, then it is something to ignore. I did notice that while he only
really turned from one woman, he wasn't really drug through any other areas
with women that weren't children. The only adultish people he really maimed
were male. Still, I wondered if his only reasoning for being afraid or weak
against pregnant women was that he prophesied his death by bludgeoning via
fertility idol. I got the idea that he was death and a woman was life, but I just
didn't buy into all human women being the ultimate enemy. Plus, outside of the
man wielding the fertility statue, women were not the cause of his demise. It
was just Rawhead's fear.
You brought up a lot of things I agree with, and one I missed.
ReplyDeleteI thought his weakness was women on their period, not pregnant women, so that makes a lot of things in the story clearer, but also concerns me that a reader could miss that because it was too vague in wording for me.
Also, I agree that one thing I loved about this author was the voice. It was what makes me want to read more from the books of blood.
I didn't have that image of rawhead in my mind at all because I had the novel version. I imagined him more like a golem or an orc than like a skeletal tree thing like the photo you have posted.
I like the lore behind rawhead much more than the story of him itself. I want to hear the previous tale f how he got captured more than the one of his death.
Since you bring up the insane world of editing. T.S. Elliot's Waste Land was edited by Pound heavily. It was basically entirely rewritten by Ezra , in fact. He condensed it to nearly half its original length. Weird how a poem dedicated to Pound became a poem he pretty much rewrote.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the tone of the work. It was very in-your-face, as Jeff points out. Without this type of cadence, I feel like Rawhead would have failed as the monster he was. I mean, he looked brutal, so his actions being anything less would have been extremely disappointing.
I did not envision Rawhead looking like that picture you posted. That body is emaciated, and I thought him to be stouter. I did end up looking for pictures of him on the internet and came a cross a model for sale for like $99. In that model, he is pretty burly, and really looks like an orc. That was more how I envisioned him. However, I pictured him with more teeth. Not fewer, larger ones that stuck out.
ReplyDeleteThe line you quoted was interesting because that was the first time we get Rawhead's POV take on the automobile. That line right there tells you that he thinks they are alive. I thought that was pretty cool. Barker reinforced the notion that Rawhead thought cars were a living being, and it was fun to see him try to come to grips with all the changes that had occurred in the world since he had last roamed it.
I laughed at the part about the cars being alive, too! It was definitely a well-executed moment of lightness that made me smile thinking about this monster being confused by automobiles and the other trappings of 21st century tourist life.
DeleteI love what you said about every word in that story being essential. I thought the story had a great style, even though it's very different than my own.
ReplyDeleteWhat I took away about Rawhead's weakness is that it was the fertility of women that frightened him and their ability to create life. The Venus was used as an icon of a fertility goddess, and I guess Barker's under the impression that menstruation is a fertile time for women (though I think what he's thinking of is ovulation—more accurate, but less bloody). To me, Rawhead seemed to symbolize all of the very patriarchal aspects of the Church, making his fear of pre-Christian goddess-worship more allegorical and therefore more interesting. I agree though that it would have been nice to see him interact with more women throughout the book, though. I think we can put that down to Mr. Barker being a male author writing in the 1980s—his women are plot devices more than they are characters, only present in the book to rationalize why the (by-default) male characters act the way they do.