Week Four: "Rawhead Rex"

The reading for this week is spider-free, which is a plus for me because I haven’t been able to look at the spider that lives outside my window the same since reading Breeding Ground (fun fact, I've name said spider Sarah Pinborough). While the setting of this week’s story keeps me in small-town England, Clive Barker's short story Rawhead Rex deals with baby-eating giants rather than nightmare-inducing beasties.   

And Rawhead Rex was the first monster I've truly liked this term.

Rex was the first monster who was wholly present throughout the entire story. He didn't remain passively in the background the way the vampires did in I Am Legend or the Widows in Breeding Ground. I feel like the potential both monsters had was wasted, especially the Widows. Both are explained, they’re terrifying, but then they don’t do anything. Neville is too busy with his science and Matt is too busy with his women to really pay attention to the monsters in their lives.

But Rex demands to be remembered. He’s Barker's take on the Boogeyman, the monster that's under the bed or in the shadows waiting to eat small children. Some might know him as Bloody Bones, others might view him as a symbol for the Devil. Either way, he’s been lurking in minds for centuries.

The story opens with Thomas Garrow clearing a plot of land for farming. The land hasn't been touched in years, and Garrow doesn't know why. He just wants to plant some hops, or maybe a nice orchard, but there’s a giant slab of rock in the middle of the field that has to be moved before he can plant anything. Garrow manages to dislodge the rock, and inadvertently frees the boogeyman. Enter Rawhead Rex, all nine-feet of him. Rex crawls out of his prison-grave where he’s been trapped since the Middle Ages and is hungry for some children.

From his first appearance, I read Rex as having a rock star vibe. He’s called “The King” throughout the piece--rex is Latin for king. He takes what he wants when he wants it, and he gets a kick out of doing it. Before he was trapped underground, he and his brothers owned the earth, which indicates that Rex is something primordial. “Just because [the people] had tamed the wilderness for a while didn't mean they owned the earth. It was his, and nobody would take it from him” (Books of Blood: Volumes One to Three, 371). He even has a modern-day minion in Declan Ewan, the town Verger who finds pleasure in letting Rex piss on him. (If that's not twisted devotion, I don't know what is.)

Rex is also the most concretely described monster so far this term. Aside from his physical appearance, the explanation of his origin is peppered throughout the story. Barker gives just enough of Rex’s back story to satisfy the reader. What I needed to know is how or if Rex could be destroyed. And just like every good monster, Rex has his Kryptonite: fertile women. Not improbable science that has to make up its own rules to explain itself.

When Rex goes on his first killing spree, he doesn't kill the menstruating Gwen because her monthly blood disgusts him. He's killed by a statue of a fertile woman. “To him the stone was the thing he feared most: the bleeding woman, her gaping hole eating seed and spitting children. It was life, that hole, that woman, it was endless fecundity. It terrified him” (406). His fear slows him down enough that the villagers overpower him and bash in his skull with the statue.

Rex’s fear is primal. Even though only women can carry and birth the children he desperately craves, they have the power of life which contradicts his power of death. Rex is almost a caricature of maleness, from his huge size to his strength to him marking his minion with urine. He lives to kill the innocent, while women are designed to give life to the innocent. Rex took his revenge on women in the Middle Ages by raping them—he knew they couldn't survive the pregnancy because they were physically incapable of carrying his children to term. Yet no matter how much he hates women, he can't survive in a world without them. He might physically overpower them for a time, but ultimately women overpower him because they produce life while all he can do is end life. Even when he created life by impregnating women, he knew neither the women nor his children would survive.

Gynophobia, anyone? There's something great about the monster who only desires to be feared having a fear itself.

I can forgive Barker the constant head-hopping because he created a monster I can understand, partially because I've been familiar with the idea of the boogeyman all my life and partially because his fear of feminine isn't so far reaching that it falls short of suspending my disbelief. Rex is big and bad—he always has been and he always will be. He's violent and dangerous, and Barker doesn't coddle the reader from this. He's what every monster should be: something worth fearing.

Works Cited

Barker, Clive. "Rawhead Rex." 1984. Books of Blood: Vols 1-3. New York: Berkley, 1998. 362-407. Print.