I first heard about The Tale of Raw Head & Bloody Bones when I was browsing the Vintage Books website and I stumbled upon blog posts written by the author Jack Wolf. In them the writer described the influences behind his debut novel and his choices to combine malignant folk tales of goblin kings and bogeymen. These posts, which continued on to cover the topics of Madness and Sexuality, ran alongside weekly bulletins from the book’s Facebook page supplying titbit facts on madhouses and medicine in the eighteenth century. As a sucker for publicity and anything of the gory historical nature I pre-ordered my own hardback copy before its January release date.
The book arrived, its cover evoking imagery not dissimilar
to the Headless Horseman Legend of Sleepy Hollow, but its pages revealed a heavily researched delve into the world of mid-eighteenth century
England. A world Jack Wolf lovingly assembles with painstaking detail right
down to the whitelead faces of the female characters and ole time language
which reveals the tale of the younge protagonist Tristan Hart.
At first the language presents a difficultly in achieving a
flow while reading, but as the pages turn your mind ceases to stumble over the words
and the Yeares of Tristan are laid out before your eyes.
The Tale of Raw Head
& Bloody Bones is the account of a young budding anatomical student’s study
of pain and his descent into madness.
The story opens in the pastoral setting of Berkshire, where
Tristan grows up as the son of a squire, free to room the slopes of the chalk
horse and create mischief in the neighbouring apple orchards. Yet despite his
privileged background, and bountiful opportunities to fool around with the
local tavern maids, Tristan is unsatisfied, and craves for something more
beyond the idle pursuits of pleasure.
What he craves lurks underneath the pale surface of skin, and
can only be sought out in candlelit dissecting rooms of London's academia and furthermore whispered
of in the darkest rooms of city's illicit brothel dens.
On the outer surface Tristan Hart is a bright young man who
is dutifully studying medicine with the aim of uprooting the causes of
humanity’s Ills, but below this visage is a sadistic monster who seeks out
scalpels, whips and chains to cure the drumming hallucinations inside his head…
For his debut Jack Wolf has warped an uncomfortable
concoction of folk tales with the Scientific Revolution and used the settings
of stuffy vivisection laboratories and haunts of sexual depravity. While one
can admire the depths which Jack Wolf goes create this twisted fairytale, any
hope for a breather fails, and even a flight through the fields of Tristan’s
Berkshire homelands cannot avoid disorientating hallucinations of gnomes,
fairies and bat children.
The verdict simply reads: not for the faint of heart. Pumping through the veins of this debut is an antithesis
what the scientific thought of the time were trying to achieve. In the vessel
of Tristan Hart Jack Wolf delivers an unnerving study of extremity assembled
with a gruesome poetic fibre.
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