COWS

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The cows kept coming, and each one took something from him; shavings of sensitivity, perception, care. He was being robbed, violated. One of the few parts of himself he wanted to keep was being cauterised into hard scar tissue." I'm not normally one to preface a review, or even mention in a review, when a book is not appropriate for certain audiences. (I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). But I'm going to start this one by saying, quite bluntly, Cows is not for everyone. In fact, Cows may not be for anyone. It is scatological, offensive, disgusting, filled to the brim with sex, violence, and sexual violence, and is probably capable of inciting nausea in those who are perfectly capable of sitting through atrocity footage and watch driving school videos for fun. Wow. I knew how violent, bloody, gritty and possibly gross this book was supposed to be but little did I realize it was true. This book is extreme and not for everyone, probably not even for most people. There were multiple times when I had to pause in my reading to catch my breathe. Or where I cringed in sympathetic pain. Or where I had to simply absorb what I had read before I tried feeding my brain more images and more pain. However, unlike many torture porn horror movies, there was a true story here. Just a white wall and, down near the floor, the ventilation grille. Then movement behind the grille and Steven was on his knees, peering through it, pressing his face against the mesh. In there, in the shadows beyond the spill of light from the hall, the outline of an anvil-shaped head swayed gently.

Gloria : Oh, come on now, you’re obsessed. How would you know? There’s no pictures of Matthew Stokoe anywhere – remember we were googling on Clara’s laptop the other day, after milking time? Not one picture, and there’s none on any of his books like most human authors do. And when you actually read this filth, you can quite see why. Moo. Anyway, in total I didn't find anything deep, or moving, or intellectual here. I didn't find any inner beauty that only those who "get it" can see. I didn't find this to be an important novel in any capacity. You can paint a canvas with shit, and in the right place at the right time, you'll find enough influential people to convince others of its genius that you have a following. That's what "COWS" really means to me. This is at risk of becoming a Discredited Trope as modern slaughterhouses are required by both their very nature and by law to be as ridiculously clean as possible. It's not unheard of for a person to walk outside a slaughterhouse and smell nothing but bleach and cleaning agents. As for their wastewater runoff, that's a different story. Roxanne: Don’t come the innocent with us, sunshine. You’re Matthew stokoe, author of the notorious novel Cows. Which we have read. And we’re cows, as you may have noticed. The word is out that Cows is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Banks' classic The Wasp Factory. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written."

All genres:

Eat up ma," he says. Now, the Hagbeast is not stupid. No sir. She tells him that there's no way she's eating what he's prepared, unless he eats it as well. So, he takes a bite. And the Hagbeast starts shoving the shit into her ugly face, only to puke all over the kitchen table. I have to stop here or I will end up writing a novel - buy this book - follow the life of Steven and Lucy along with the herd of cows living under the city. Hmmm where to begin. OK well let's begin with the five star rating system. If I allocated stars for books based on enjoyment and pleasure levels would this get five stars? No. Likewise if I allocated stars on how widely read I think a book ought to be, would this get five stars there? Definitely, a no. For sheer originality, uniqueness of vision, and bravura storytelling, and the fact that it has the impact of a freight train, this book most certainly gets five stars from me. Her comment is practically unprovoked and one could imagine this scene playing out awkwardly in an uncomfortable amateur art film or an endless Godard monologue. It wasn't until well into the novel that I decided that Stokoe meant for much of the dialogue to be read more as a philosophical lesson than as actual conversation between two people. He places his characters in such unbearable situations that the only way to cope, the only way to process what they are going through is to do it out loud and in the most complex was possible. Viewed in this context the dialogue begins to work and adds a lot to the general feeling of the novel even if it is jarring to go from an extremely violent scene to a staid discussion of the transformative powers of violence. I don't think Matthew Stokoe wanted to convey a particular message, or to be sensational. In my opinion he had an idea, then gave free rein to his imagination. This book is very brutal, gory, immoral, disturbing, disgusting, in short eviscerating. And more importantly, it’s very well written and coherent. I couldn’t put it down.

In a decaying apartment: a mother, a son and a paralysed dog. Monstrously fat and murderously driven, referred to only as The Hagbeast, the mother employs her own unique version of dinnertime cuisine as she attempts to bring about the demise of her only child.​I cried - yes I did.....and then I tried explaining it to my boyfriend who just looked at me like I had 6 heads....or was that 4 stomachs?? I tried - I really tried and all I could think to compare it to was Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal".....OK everyone - go GOOGLE that and I'll wait till you return..........

The question COWS raises (the book seems to be cited in all-caps, which is appropriate to the way it shouts its perversions and obscenities) have to do with the place of extreme subject matter in art. In visual art, it’s common for students to become interested in violent or disturbing images, such as photos of car crash victims or medical deformities, and to try to use them in their work. Often it turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to use such images simply because they are so strong. A photograph of a man with Ebola just won’t fit with a collage of other images of Africa. Artists who have tried such experiments have sometimes found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions. (The intricate aesthetization of the unusual images, as Max Kosloff pointed out years ago, is a way of counterbalancing the subject matter, and somehow making the image into art.) For a contemporary artist it shouldn’t necessarily matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose of choosing strong images, after all, is seldom to produce a pleasing or harmonious effect—but somehow it does. Despite the aesthetics of discontinuity and collage instituted by postmodernism, despite a half-century of work done without interest in aesthetic effect, we still find that very strong images don’t work as fine art unless they are elaborately contextualized, made to work aesthetically. It’s a puzzle that we still want our art, in these cases, to be nominally harmonious and coherent. And it’s interesting that given all the pressure contemporary artists face to be avant-garde, difficult, new, politically visible, strong, or persuasive, and in general to stand out against a crazily crowded field—that given all that, it’s interesting that the very strongest images are not more commonly used. I had to think, before writing my review. I understand why there is controversy surrounding this book. This book touched me so much, that it took me a while, to put my ideas into place. I loved it! The only two parts of the book I truly found disturbing was the killing of ol’ Gummy, but even that was a bit rushed (or maybe it’s hard to give a crap about the killing of a characters whose introduction was his graphic description of making out with a cow), and the part where our protagonist breaks and files down the teeth of the Hagbeast before human centipeding her. In fact, that was probably my favorite part of the book in the sense that it made me physically cringe and that I’ll probably be thinking about it for some time to come. The rest was all very gory but mostly forgettable.Roxanne : Yeah? And how would you know so much about an obscure avant-garde novelist as all that? Your bluster butters no parsnips with us, buddy boy. We have this! (Five cows simultaneously hold up the photocopied picture.)

Forget it....You can't kill without getting infected. It don't have the effect Cripps says, but it gets under your skin in other ways. We warned you." 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. Have you watched 2 Girls 1 Cup? What was your response? If it was anything other than ‘what is the art behind this’ you’ll be best to pass. Things that occur – animal abuse and torture, self mutilation, matricide, infanticide, beastiality, scat play and ingestion and homicide just to name a few. In fact, I think many readers, whether familiar with things like power electronics or not, were trying to make a similar association with this book, transcending aesthetics. And in some ways, I get it. Certainly this book, with its nonstop brutality and descriptions of repulsive sensory experiences, attempts to desensitize the reader much as the main character in this story becomes desensitized and becomes a serial killer.Initially the dialogue in Cows seems forced, almost laughable. Many conversations come off as clunky, affected, and most of the characters appear pretentious or insane. Upon returning from his first day of work, stinking and covered in slaughter byproducts Steven Runs into his disturbed love interest in the hall of their council house. A piece of meat falls from his hair and she asks: Steven doesn't know it, but he can't fulfill his dreams of a normal life. He’ll meet a cow that will change his life. he won’t have a normal life, but he’ll be free to be who he, truly is. After reading what I have just written, you are probably wondering, what is so intense about this story. I won't tell you, because I think you have to read this book, knowing as little as possible. Few are the gross-out books and movies that properly utilise gore in service of the story. This book is a shining example of how to do it. The wretched set-up is necessary to prime our suspension of disbelief for what is yet to come. Every horrible incident that follows thereafter is a stepping stone on Stephen’s path towards becoming cow Hitler (I don’t know what else to call it). 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. Jones: This place is COVERED with blood! How are we supposed to figure out which is pork and which is woman?!