Rawhead Rex- Clive Barker

           I loved Rawhead as a monster. He was a real monster in its purest form, as Rawhead at his core, is a force of nature. He was the physical embodiment of the most monstrous things, rage, hunger, destruction, and unlike many other monsters (which are monstrous in a very different way) Rawhead is completely devoid of humanizing characteristics. Rawhead is not a monster that can be reasoned with, and he is not a monster that can be changed. He is as he always was. He is exactly as he was created.

            Some of the specific details that made this beast so effective.

            Rawhead was created out of centuries of mythology and folklore. Rawhead, and the other names he was known by, comes to us out of generations of European oral tradition. The monster is ancient (both in the story) and in human history. Because of this, even in this new rendition of the creature, Rawhead had a definite authenticity about him. Rawhead is not a monster that will be scaring us for an hour as we read through Barker’s short story, but rather, Rawhead is a monster that has been scaring us since early history. Our ancestors cowered in their huts and villages, listening to the wolves and wind in the dark, surrounded on all sides by enormous stretches of untamed wilderness, and they believed this beast was out there. There is something deeply disturbing about a monster that was truly believed to exist. If only in the minds of our ancestors and frightened sixteenth century children, Rawhead was real.

            We were privileged to Rawhead’s POV. This is an element that I always love in stories, whether the monster is a sympathetic evil or not. Rawhead is not. When we get into Rawhead’s, erm, raw head, we see beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the inside matches the outside. Rawhead is the violence and destruction he brings. He has no deeper motive for it, and where in some cases this makes for a poorly drawn character, in this case it solidifies the monster. As a pagan god, and possibly the product of pure belief, Rawhead is the physical manifestation of destruction. The monster never ponders on why he does what he does, he is what he does. This served to heighten the sense of unstoppable power Rawhead possesses as a force of nature.

            Now that I’ve gone on about why Rawhead is a good monster, I’ll mention the reasons I also found him to be a likeable monster.

            I liked Rawhead. Really, I did. I actually liked Rawhead more than any of the other characters in the story. Now, there is a distinction between like, in the Rawhead sense, and like in a protagonist or antihero sense. Rawhead is the villain, and will always be the villain. He is horrible, and does horrible things, but Rawhead also has these tiny details that make me enjoy him while I'm waiting for someone to kill the bastard.

            Rawhead is out of his time. He’s been imprisoned beneath the earth for ages, and in that time the world he knew has passed. He emerges to find his vast wilderness kingdom gone and replaced with paved streets and metal boxes that make terrible noises and stink. There is a sense of loss there, not for Rawhead, but for the time that birthed him. The world was once a truly wild place, where the forces of nature held sway, and humans where the pathetic worm-like creatures without big teeth or claws, that had to huddle by the fire to survive. The world held places of deep shadow and darkness. The world held true terror, the unknown. Rawhead is the monstrous child of a world that died long ago, under the plow, concrete, and written word. I feel something for that. When in his head and seeing this world, new to him, I always feel a sab of loss with the terror. That gave just enough variability to what I felt for the monster, to heighten the dread of his main attributes, and make me like him.

            Ok, and maybe he reminded me of Grendel. An R-rated, soulless, distilled evil, version of Grendel.