Rawhead Rex or something like that
I want to first admit that I’ve never really been a Barker fan. I know he’s a quintessential horror author, one that everyone is supposed to read, but I never really got into his style. I read required stuff previously from Books of Blood and didn’t really enjoy it. The story that sticks out the most is “Dread.” The story is about a psychotic guy that does experiments on his friends to the extreme. I thought the ending was hokey, the characters were cardboard and it overall didn’t work for me. I had a few theories about what happened to the characters, because the ending so ambiguous. Needless to say, I had that story in mind when I picked up this book to read.
I tried not to look at it the same way I did “Dread” because story collections don’t always have across the board greatness on every page. I know that one bad story can bring down the rest when personal opinions are concerned, so I did my best to come into this story without any notions of lack of enjoyment.
I think “Rawhead Rex” went along the same lines as far as likeability went, although I didn’t hate this story as much as I disliked “Dread” I still felt like this story wasn’t all there.
There were a few things that made this story hard for me to enjoy. First, there was the premise of Rex living underground for centuries. This was an interesting start. I didn’t expect this monster to break through the ground and overtake the town but it was hard for me to follow though. What drove him there-I know it was answered, but not to my satisfaction- why wasn’t he able to push this stone out of the way before the ground settled? As I was reading this, I got a picture that the big stone might be Rawhead’s head, but that didn’t work either. I guess I needed a little more from Barker by way of description.
Next, the whole village is being attacked in pieces, but this doesn’t seem to raise any alarm until the ending. How could you miss the screams of a horse being ripped apart or the shattering lumber of a house being dismantled by fists? Aren’t people in villages, like the one described here, nosy? I know if my house was being ravaged by some monster, my neighbors would take notice. Maybe I’m thinking more US centric than about the English countryside, but I find this a fault.
I also thought there was a “rule” that authors shouldn’t change point of view in the middle of a paragraph or in a single point of view section. If I remember correctly, this was done a bunch of times at the end of a section. The story seemed to jump around a lot there.
One thing that bothered me was if Rex was strong enough to withstand being buried alive for all those years, how is it that he is overpowered in the end? Is it because he hasn’t gained back all his strength from muscle atrophy? I don’t buy that, he rips apart a horse, although I’ve never tried it I’m sure the horse would put up a fight. He also tears through buildings like they are made of basal wood. So his lack of strength is not an issue. It doesn’t appear that any modern means were used: guns, cannons, automobiles. He was just bull-rushed because he's staring at a talisman and taken down. For a monster of this caliber, it seemed like an unfitting end.
This may just be me, but I could never get a solid picture of what Rex looked like. I saw glimpses but the only thing I could think of was the troll in the first Lord of the Rings movie. He was big, angry, but we didn’t really know why. Because of this, I wasn’t really afraid of him, I just thought he was an over sized bully.
So, where does this fit into the monster genre. Well, when I signed up for this class, this is the type of stories I thought we were going to read. I thought there would be novel versions of Godzilla or King Kong. I never thought we’d be delving into vampires and zombies but I guess that was my notion of monsters.
I’m going to do my best to read “The Yattering and Jack” without distaste, but I’ve already picked it up a couple of times, and couldn’t muster through the first page.
On another note, how would you take down a monster of this size if it were just you?