Rawhead Rex

Rawhead Rex is easily my favorite monster so far in this class. He’s a brutally mean destroyer who’s out for blood and carnage. But the best part is that he is undefined, especially when compared to other monsters we’ve read about. I Am Legend had vampires, The Funeral had witches and beasts, Breeding Ground had widow spiders—all of these are common, well-defined monsters. You say your character is a vampire, and every reader will instantly identify with that. Every reader will also bring their pre-conceived notions of that monster along with them, whether that means they instantly fear the beast or instantly laugh at it (I instantly laugh at zombies, for example). Rawhead Rex defies this principal. Barker introduces us to the monster simply by describing him physically, with the worm-filled hair and huge body, and—my favorite—the mouth that “splits the moon” when it opens and is filled with two sets of teeth. And at that first introduction, we see Rawhead rip off a scalp, bite off a head, and bury his enemy upside down in the ground. Pure evil. I read that and let all of my fears take over and fill in the blanks with Rawhead. I could picture him as a unique monster with all of this drool and blood lust, and that’s way more intense than any vampire, in my opinion.

While I thought that the ferocity of Rawhead carried through the book, and I never stopped loving the monster, there were a few things that kind of lessened his impact for me. For one, before he eats the pony, he’s watching Gwen and can’t eat her because of feminine issues. I get that he’s the male, phallic beast and feminine things stop him (the Venus rock did him in, after all), but the amount of time that female issues were mentioned on the page kind of grossed me out. I almost felt like Barker himself was trying to make some PMS joke, and it didn’t work. There were more graceful ways to pull this off, I think.

The other thing that bothered me in this story was Gwen’s second scene, when she’s trying to save her daughter. Rawhead Rex is nine feet tall…he can reach the second story of a building. Yet this woman carries her daughter upstairs, where she’s trapped, to protect her from a monster fully capable of tearing the house down. Some may argue that these were the actions of a desperate woman, but I read that and thought…how stupid could she be? At least for a few moments, Rawhead was distracted breaking through furniture, so why not try to sneak out through the other end of the house and escape unnoticed? That’s better than trapping yourself and basically feeding your daughter to the monster. I’m beginning to notice that a monster is only is good as the people it hunts, a villain is only good as the hero it faces. When rivals make stupid choices that make them easy to defeat, it takes away from the monster in the story. So, when Gwen did that, Rawhead lost something as a consequence. Of course, he regained all his macho-monster goodness when he continued on his killing spree. But for a moment, I was bored. (OK, maybe that just means I’m a sick individual, if I was bored with a monster trying to eat people.)

The other thing I love about Rawhead, though, is how he very much acts like a beast. His strength is in his innate ability to control people (think Declan) and to bite them in half. He’s no sly devil, like Randall Flagg. He’s pure power. And I felt that power on the page.

My final comment is this: even though this class focuses on the beasts, I can’t help but mention that sometimes fighting makes monsters out of men. Anyone else think Declan became a monster himself when he first talks about Rawhead? I mean, he smiles when he talks about how the beast eats children…that’s pretty monstrous, if you ask me.