Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker

From the terrifying mind behind The Hellbound Heart (you might know it by its movie title, Hellraiser) comes one of his short story masterpieces…Rawhide Rex.

But is it a masterpiece?

For two pages I read, enthralled by Barker’s easy-to-read, yet substantially artistic prose. I felt I was reading one of the best short stories I’ve ever laid eyes upon. It was amazing, and for a brief ten minutes I felt as if the short story rapture was upon me. Oh, glorious day!

Then Rawhide Rex himself appeared.

I’ll break this blog post into two parts: the good and the bad. In lesser hands, there would be ugly, but Barker is a master of the macabre on par with the greats. Hell, he is one of the greats. He can get away with breaking the rules because he knows what the rules are and doesn’t give a fuck.

The good: This short is full of fantastic, easy to follow prose. There’s nary a place where I stumbled over the text, even though he writes in a literary style. It’s a watered-down literary style that invites the common reader in and rewards them with popular fiction story-telling with smarty-guy words and phrasing. He doesn’t make the reader feel silly about reading about a monster eating a child.

His messages and meanings float to the surface easily enough, and at the hands of an inferior writer would almost be spoon feeding. Religion, parenthood, greed, hubris… they all play prominent roles in this story. But, oddly enough, so does false idolization, loneliness, selflessness and modesty. I was in awe of the way Barker juggled all these themes while telling the story of a centuries-old child-eating beast. Without giving a blow-by-blow synopsis of the story, imagine the Lorax as nine-foot tall, immortal, murderous animal with a hatred toward man but a love of sweet, sweet baby meat… who’s into watersports (not jet ski watersports, the other kind).

The bad: So. Much. Head hopping. As students of popular fiction, we’re told this is bad. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but generally it’s believed it’s difficult for the reader to follow who’s thinking what. Barker takes us from the terror of being chased to the thrill of the hunt in a single sentence. If I had read this without being enrolled in a writing popular fiction program, I may not have even noticed. But I am and I did.

There were also a lot of typos. This isn’t really against the writer in general, but it is about the book. Or books, to be more precise. Several books that were 1.) compiled into six short anthologies… at minimum that is two editing/publishing cycles, and 2.) were further compiled into two anthologies… at a minimum that’s three editing/publishing cycles. The typos should’ve been caught and dealt with far earlier. I can deal with them on a first edition, but c’mon now…

So, the bad was less about content and more about style. Let’s get to some general observances.

Rawhide Rex as a monster is fantastic. He’s properly scary but human-like. Think of a blood-thirsty sasquatch if my earlier description of him seems hard to digest. A blood-thirsty, warrior, immortal sasquatch with little knowledge of the modern world. He’s got an agenda that isn’t so much evil as it is evolutionarily sadistic. He’s just a monster that likes baby meat. He hates people like a wolf hates people: encroaching trespassers who have no right to play in the same arena as he.

I’m not saying he’s relatable. No. I found his methods stomach-turning and a little uncomfortable to read. I’m saying he isn’t a mindless monster like something from The Blob or The Mist. He’s just a thing trying to eat and rule over his land.

Like all short stories, the best parts come at the end. This ending featured an unlikely—and arguably, unlikeable—hero that the reader won’t see coming.

If I gave scores, I’d rate this short story some amount of stars out of an equal or greater amount stars (but closer to equal).