Cows

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From the outset of this heartbreakingly powerful contemporary noir, Stokoe (High Life) gets the reader deeply emotionally invested in his guilt-ridden narrator, Johnny Richardson. 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.

Slaughter about medical “professionals caught up in a kaleidoscope of crippling disease” in which we find “the fluxuating chart of their own ambitions and ardent dreams” that must be medsploitation, or surgploitation, or sexploitation or all of these.Christine (a bespectacled cow with a chic French look) : You know, I hate to say this, but he’s not entirely wrong. I don't really have an idea how to perform such an analysis, partly because I can see how the ingredients work together to produce the book's effects, and partly because I can't enumerate the kinds of extreme subjects, acts, and descriptions.

COWS’ itself is just that, a young man who longs to break free from the chains that he’s been born into and find happiness and meaning, if only it is an idea of what it should be and should look like.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. He also has a pet dog named DOG, whom is his only friend, and who’s back has been broken by “The HogBeast” by flinging a brick at the dog. I was led to this book by various reviews that said things like “the most extreme novel you’ll ever read” (from the back cover copy), “gruesome beyond reason,” “most intense book I have ever read,” “most gruesome book I have ever read,” “I almost felt like I was doing something wrong reading it. Matthew Stokoe has written a novel like no other I've ever read--appalling, funny, and possessed of a sense of outre violence that makes Joris-Karl Huysmans read like Louisa May Alcott. We the readers quickly find out the extremes with which the mother torments her son; after a lifetime of this, Steven is left nearly powerless.

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.He doesn’t seem to have thought about the fragmented consciousness of Naked Lunch, or the ecstatic prejudices and violence of Céline. Perhaps that is because I also have been a lifelong listener of some of the darker subgenres of industrial music, such as power electronics, which highlights sensory experiences otherwise abrasive and repellent and uses them in a way that somehow captures a bleak psychological concept or story, while also managing to capture the beauty behind the noise.

Stokoe doesn’t seem to have thought about the fragmented consciousness of Naked Lunch, or the ecstatic prejudices and violence of Céline. When she enlists Steven's help to manipulate a piece of invasive medical apparatus, he begins to see that a better life might indeed be possible. I’m not sure if it was because they wanted to see my thoughts on it or if they wanted to know if I had the fortitude to dive past the garbage that floated at the top of the water and see the story that lay on the ocean floor, but either way, I finally realized I wanted to dive in and truthfully, while this book is DEFINITELY not for everyone, I was stunned with the story Stokoe delivered. After the roof got old, he started watching television obsessively, coming to believe that American sitcom families from the fifties led normal lives, and guaging happiness by those standards.

Matthew Stokoel has the ability to create a profound satire mixed in with cannibalism, bestiality, gore, sexual perversion, abuse, self mutilation. Stokoe stays true to a bleak vision of the world as he enmeshes his characters in the kinds of tragic setups reminiscent of a Thomas Hardy novel. 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. 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. I've never read something so ridiculous, so poorly written, so completely embarassing in terms of "extreme literature".