By Catriona Ward
I first heard of Rawblood from a Goodreads recommendation, something like the 100 Best Horror novels since 2000. It also won the British Fantasy award for best horror novel in 2016. The premise was unbearably intriguing: a gothic love story with supernatural horror elements set in the Devon moors of the early 20th century.
Reader, if you’re intrigued as I was, stop reading now, there be big time spoilers ahead!
With a title like Rawblood, I assumed it was going to be a modern spin on Wuthering Heights with vampirism, or cannibalism, thrown in (the romantic cannibal flick, Bones and All, has been getting some hype).
Well, the North American version is titled The Girl from Rawblood and the hardcover isn’t available yet in Canada (it will also be full price as it’ll be a new release). However, since Rawblood had been published years ago in the UK, I was able to place an order on Abe Books (along with two Eve Babitz books) for a new UK paperback (for less than $10 USD!) to arrive at my in-laws address during the Xmas holiday.
On New Year’s Day, I flew home solo while hubs and daughter stayed in Berkeley a few more days. My mild cold had blossomed into a miasma of mucus and phlegm, so my first few days back in Montreal was spent working, eating, horking, and lots of streaming entertainment. After a few days, I was ready to pick up a book, and chose Rawblood to kick off the year.
Rawblood. Home. It sounds like a battle, like grief, but it’s a gentle name. ‘Raw’ from ‘Straw’, which means ‘flowing’, for the Dart River that runs nearby. ‘Blood’ from ‘Bont’, a bridge. Old words. The house by the bridge over flowing water. It has been in my family since I don’t know when. Rawblood is us and we, the Villarcas, are Rawblood.
The chapter begins in 1910, with eleven year old Iris Villarca and her friendship with the slightly older Tom Gilmore, who works as a groom on the estate, Rawblood. Iris’ father, Alfonso, forbids her from having close associations with outsiders, so Iris and Tom have to sneak around at night to hang out.
These are among the first things I recall my father teaching me: that I must keep quiet and may not go among many people or to towns, because of the disease; and that Rawblood is written into us.
The reason behind Alfonso’ strict rules is because there is a dreaded family curse. The nature of the curse is a close-kept secret, but Alfonso tells Iris that it’s horror autotoxicus, a kind of auto-immune disease, and that she must always control her emotions and to never to fall in love with anyone, because that’s when the disease arises, from strong, unbridled emotions.
Loneliness is not what people think it is. It is not a song. It's a little bitter thing you keep close, like an egg under a hen. What happens when the shell cracks? What comes forth?
When Iris realizes that horror autotoxicus isn’t a real disease, and that she had a terrifying vision the night she went to the cave with Tom, Alfonso finally tells her that the family curse is really an apparition in the form of a horribly mutilated woman (always referred to as her) who haunts Rawblood, and somehow causes the untimely death of a family member. As one Goodreads reviewer put it: Some see her and go mad, and kill their loved one before she can. Others simply die of fright. Still more claw their own eyes out to rid themselves of the sight of her.
Once Iris asked her father:
What does she want? From us.
‘It is so strange,’ he says. He’s thoughtful of a sudden, removed. It is moments like this that I remember that my father was a doctor, once. ‘So inconstant, her wishes … they are crude like the desires of a child. She wants us close – she wants us here. But she does not like us to grow, to live. It is as if she would have Rawblood and all of us in it suspended for ever, unchanging… under glass, in a museum case. What for? Do we amuse her? Sometime I have thought, over the years, that we are merely playthings of a kind. But she kills her toys, in the end.’
Alternating timelines were devoted to Alfonso’s old friend, Charles Danforth. Chapter Two introduced Charles in 1881, while he was travelling by train to see Alfonso at Rawblood. The two men were medical students and roommates, but they had lost touch over the years. It’s hinted that Charles, being a man of faith, was horrified when he consummated his love for Alfonso. Meanwhile Alfonso had always been obsessed with finding a cure for the family curse. Being a man of science, he believed the curse was a form of congenital madness that has plagued the Villarcas-Hopewells bloodlines for generations. Charles was coming to help Alfonso with his research, just like old times.
While Charles and Alfonso conducted their strange experiments in the bowels of Rawblood, their relationship was fraught with tension, dead tortured lab animals, repressed secrets, laudenam and latent homosexuality. When Charles finally set eyes on her, he was traumatized as he realized there was no God, and ended up committing suicide. We learn later that Iris’ mother was Charles’ estranged younger sister, Meg, whom Alfonso had promised to take care of and later married.
Sometimes, I walk through it in my dreams - the interior of my heart. It is like a black land, where black flags hang in tatters and venomous plants grow in sickly clumps and serpents writhe...A deadly night garden, my heart.
Eventually, Iris met a grim fate after her father died because the apparition appeared just when Iris attempted to escape from Alfonso’s control. Iris was then committed to an insane asylum, as the authorities thought she had killed her father. I was like, holy shit, this really sucks. Maybe Tom will help her escape somehow and they’ll figure out how to end the curse. At some point, I came to realize that Iris wasn’t going to get out -- it was looking like she was going to waste away inside that institution for the rest of her life… and then she just died. I was like, WTF. This is one dark motherfucker of a book!
The book also jumped back in time to Iris’ grandparents, Don Vallarca and Mary Hopewell, to when they first met. It was a lovely story that diverted from Iris’ horrible fate, and that section alone could’ve made a nice gothic romance. But it was also a kind of red herring, as it strengthened my belief that there was some malevolent supernatural entity and made me wonder how it could’ve latched onto the Vallarca and Hopewell family.
The reveal of the Rawblood Ghost’s identity was not as revelatory as it could’ve been by no fault of the author. It’s because the time-transcending nature of the apparition immediately made me think of The Bent Neck Lady from the hit Netflix series, The Haunting of Hill House. Time-travelling ghosts probably aren’t a novel idea, but probably not common either. Rawblood was published in 2015, so it’s possible that Mike Flanagan was inspired by the very cool idea that entities from the spiritual realm are not bound by space and the linear advancement of time.
But
yeah, it turned out that the authorities were right, Iris did kill her father,
but not in the way they had thought! And yes, dear reader, Iris was, had become, and will always be The Bent Neck Lady. Ooooh, brrrrrr, shiver!
It was a slow burning, very detailed and meandering (if at times, uneven) build up to that shocking ending. Because of that, Rawblood was ultimately a satisfying read – with a tragic ending of all endings. What also elevated this book was Ward’s writing – haunting and evocative without being too prosey, and powerful enough to make you feel the pangs of Iris’ isolation and how generational trauma can reverberate backwards in time. An amazing feat.
I would never dare to read Rawblood again, it was so bleak and dark in its melancholic beauty. But I appreciate that other readers also loved this book.
