Cows

Product Information

Steven understands from TV what life should be, or could be, but he can't reconcile it with his reality. There is a message and there are some hilarious parts for those of us who like our humour pitch black. Matthew Stokoe is a novelist whose work has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian and German. He's twenty-five years old, and the only time he's left the flat is to run up to the roof and stare out over the city (presumably London) and imagine what life is like for normal people. Mother's corpse in bits, dead dog on the roof, girlfriend in a coma, baby nailed to the wall, and a hundred tons of homicidal beef stampeding through the tube system.

One of the most unstinting, imaginative, brutal and original contemporary novels ever written about the punishments that come with the prioritization of fame. There’s no pictures of Matthew Stokoe anywhere – remember we were googling on Clara’s laptop the other day, after milking time?

He reaches a point where he’ll do anything to get that happy life and that’s when the madness that this book is famous for begins.

What I liked: ‘COWS’ is a story that follows our main character, Steven, who longs for acceptance in a world he’s unable to participate in. It wasn't my stomach forcing that either, I read the infamous "lunch scene" while literally eating lunch lol, but it was my brain! The decision to allow the tangling of their lives had provided a veneer of distraction with which she could lightly cover the knowledge that all the systems of her soul and body, progressively corrupted since birth, were still degenerating unstoppably. Despite the aesthetics of discontinuity, collage, and bricolage instituted by postmodernism, we still find that very strong images don’t work as fine art unless they are elaborately altered and contextualized.Things that occur – animal abuse and torture, self mutilation, matricide, infanticide, beastiality, scat play and ingestion and homicide just to name a few. Why, in the 21st century, should the extremely violent, the extremely disturbing, the extremely repulsive need to be aestheticized? Deep down, I ABSOLUTELY LOVED "Cows", but on the surface, it was a bit hard to get past the shock factor! A couple of ideas I found interesting: what both Cripps and his acolyte Steven are lacking entirely is remorse. Daisy (a left-leaning cow) : I believe it neatly encapsulates the human male infantile mindset, the fear and loathing of the mother, the horror of the female power of birth, of creation if you will, and the homo-erotic desire to be a man amongst men and to take charge of your manly destiny, all of which it appears has to be achieved by killing the mother figures.

Once he is the one committing the atrocities instead of having them done to him, the gruesome scenes acquire a new timbre; they are stepping stones no more, but milestones in his evolution. Grading on the scale of blood, guts, bodily fluids and perversions that would make the Marquis De Sade himself blush, I can safely say that it makes the likes of “Pretty Girls” and “The Troop” look like middle grade books. This one will absolutely not be for everyone, but I see now why it’s gained such a long and warranted life in the dark fiction community.Stokoe has continued to explore his uniquely dark view of lives lived in the modern world, and in 2014 was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – France’s most prestigious crime writing award – for his novel, EMPTY MILE. I’m going to do my best to stay spoiler free, but I wanted to just say – this is a book that if you need any sort of trigger warning, you’ll not make it very far into it.

But also, the very obvious comment on alpha males needing to be alpha males (because if you're not first you're last). The author must really have dug deep into the darkest recesses of his mind to put some of this shit to paper.I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). Take a healthy dollop of Horatio Alger (tempered with a dash of Alger Hiss), mix in a good dose of China Mieville's King Rat, a shot of Robert Bloch, add a couple of jiggers of Peter Sotos, ten drams of Camus, two shakes of David Mamet, bung in a couple of PETA ads of the most offensive variety, and then dump the whole mess into a shaker lined with Stewart Home. Cows is also visionary, brilliant, amazingly complex, a must on my ten best reads of the year list, and the second full-length piece of fiction I have finished in less than twenty-four hours this year.