The Tale of One Bad Rat by Bryan Talbot

The Tale of One Bad Rat is the story of Helen, a teenage girl who runs away from home because she’s being sexually abused by her father. The abuse has been going on for years. Helen’s mother is hostile and dismissive, and Helen feels she has no one to turn to. So one day she packs a bag, picks up her pet rat, and leaves home. She survives in the streets of London for some time, first alone, and then living with a group of young people. She befriends one of them in particular, but for understandable reasons she has a very hard time trusting others, and she can’t stand to be physically touched in any way.

She ends up leaving London and heading for the Lake District, following the footsteps of Beatrix Potter, a favourite artist of hers. There, the peace and quiet, the close contact with nature, and the support of the loving older couple who offers her a home, Helen slowly begins to recover from what was done to her.


In addition to being an incredibly powerful story, The Tale of One Bad Rat has some of the most beautiful art I have ever seen. I won’t even attempt to describe it. I’ll just let these pictures I found speak for themselves.

One of my favourite things about this book is how well-researched it is. Sometimes I get the impression that stories about abuse are more based on a vague social perception of what abuse must be like (something done by a stranger, for example, or a one-time thing, or something that is done using physical rather than psychological coercion) than on actual abuse cases. In the afterword, Bryan Talbot explains that he listened to interviews with abuse victims and did his absolute best to get it right. I love how incredibly respectful of those who experienced this kind of abuse he was. I love that he allowed their voices to be heard.


Despite being about such a difficult topic, The Tale of One Bad Rat is by no means a depressing book. It’s also not an explicit one – it doesn’t need to be. What Helen went through is expressed in a subtle but absolutely clear way. Most of all, it’s her emotions that are addressed. This is not a book that tries to simplify things. We get the whole thing – all the difficult and contradictory feelings, all the doubts, all the things Helen has to work out.

There’s so much to this story. I feel that I’ll appreciate it more and more with each re-read. After I finished it I kept thinking about it, and I started wondering about the significance of Helen having a pet rat. Early in the book there’s a scene where Helen is panhandling. A woman and her young daughter approach her. The woman gives her a coin and asks if the girl can pet her “gerbil”. When she’s told it’s a rat, the woman shrieks in horror and pulls her daughter away. I know that a lot of people find rats disgusting, but many of the reasons for this are actually social. And there are some unfortunate parallels between the way rats and abuse victims are socially perceived. Particularly incest victims, who are often still seem as being somehow tainted.


I always feel a bit lazy if I quote from blurbs, but I just have to show you what Neil Gaiman said about this book. First because he puts it perfectly, and secondly because hey, I can be lazy sometimes:

It would be easy to simply categorize The Tale if One Bad Rat as a fine fiction about overcoming the effects of abuse. And it is that, but it is more than that: it’s a lovingly crafted story about, in the end, the meaning and value of fiction and art, and about what we take from the past, and what we bring to the future.

This is so true. There’s a section near the end where Helen retells her story as a fable about a mouse standing up to a cat, and you can see how telling that story, finding her own voice so she could tell that story, is such a huge part of her healing process. Art matters. Stories matter. They often save our lives.


I’ll leave you with a passage from the afterword by Bryan Talbot. I know it’s longish, but it’s an important one:

It’s only recently that abuse has been openly discussed in some small way in the media, and there’s a backlash of opinion about even this. People don’t want to hear it, don’t want to have to think about it. I can only think of three, perhaps four, examples in the comic-book medium that have ever tried to deal with it, even in passing. This backlash is often expressed in dismissive terms, as if we all know about the subject now and there’s no point bringing it up again. Sexual abuse occurs a great deal more frequently than murder, but watch television for a night, pick up a novel, go to the cinema, and what do you see? But then, talking about murder is not taboo.

The fact is, because the media largely ignores it, this abuse can still go on unhindered. It works in a conspiracy of silence. Most of the victims, the younger the more likely, believe that this frightening, confusing thing is happening to them alone. They dare not talk about it to anyone and become lonely and alienated. Read Helen’s dialogue concerning her feelings. This was paraphrased from transcripts of interviews with abuse survivors. I tried to let the victims speak for themselves.

Reviewed at:
The Hidden Side of a Leaf
Comics’ By Products
Valentina's Room
Books of Mee
Stuff as Dreams are Made On
Nothing of Importance
The Written World
The Book Zombie

(Let me know if I missed yours.)