Raw-Head Sex, Urine, Menstrual Blood, and Other Forgettable Fluids (Rawhead Rex)

After reading ‘Rawhead Rex’ by Clive Barker, I’d be interested to read more of the stories from the Books of Blood volumes. However, not because of Rawhead Rex because I didn’t particularly care for this story itself. The author’s writing style is what got me interested in other writing by him.

I found Rawhead Rex convoluted and disgusting. It was convoluted because of the many plot and setting inconsistencies. One plot inconsistency I found was why Rawhead didn’t fear the mom at the beginning on her period, if bleeding women was what he was scared of. He should have been afraid of her, and if he was, how was he able to overcome that and take the child from her arms anyway? How come bleeding women didn’t scare him, but a statue of a bleeding woman did?

The setting I also found confusing. I had to look up a whole slew of words while reading this short story: cleg, vestments, dyspeptic, aplomb, portico, eiderdown, peccadilloes, and copses. Now, some of these I can chalk up to not knowing religious terminology, and a few of them I was able to gauge through context, but I found this pulled me out of the story several times and forced me to reread sentences to glean that context. Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if the story had been set in the time when Rawhead was originally buried, back in older times. But this story was set in an age full of cars and modern police-issued guns. I didn’t feel like the vocabulary used in this story matched the time of the story, even if it semi-matched the setting of a small village. It didn’t work for me.

The point-of-view switches also didn’t work for me. I wish the author had either told the story from Rawhead’s perspective, or had switched POV between the victims of the monster. Instead, he does both of those, along with giving us POV from people who don’t even die from the monster. The uses of the characters names helped with this, but as you can tell from my above comment mentioning Gwen by description rather than name (I had to just scour the pages to find who the bleeding mother was), none of the characters other than Rawhead were memorable.

This is not a bad idea though. I think this would make an excellent movie if it isn’t already one. A child eater buried alive underground, but then reemerging after being forgotten by the descendants of the people that buried him and then ravaging the town. That’s a good movie. But the weird description and obsession with urine didn’t work in the story, and would be much better whether in text or on screen as blood. The ending of the book didn’t feel very satisfying for me with it ending talking about piss again. I wish it had ended with his skull being smashed in and brains going all over.

Yes, I understand this story was a lot about bodily fluids. It talks about urine, feces, menstrual blood, and much more. It even goes into great detail about the erections of men and their manhood being torn off. I’m sure it’s a social commentary on something. But the urine didn’t do it for me as a reader, and the description of Rawhead’s race having sex with the women didn’t make sense to me until he outrightly said it with the women not surviving childbirth of half-breeds. Somehow, in a story where the women are the monsters weakness, women don’t feel like heroes. They just feel objectified and useless.

I’m glad we are reading another story from Books of Blood, because I’m interested to see what else Barker has to offer, but I wouldn’t offer this story as a recommendation to my friends.