Cows

Product Information

I tried - I really tried and all I could think to compare it to was Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal". Cows then, as an exploitation novel deserves it’s own place in the sun, h’mm let me figure, Guernseyploitation?

I should have known what to expect, as I have read extreme horror and bizarro before, but unlike similar works with reviews that simply state things like "Balls to the wall! When he is introduced to brutality through his job in a slaughterhouse, he senses a change in his directionless existence.

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. To me, Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory fell flat because the protagonist’s sadism was justified with childhood trauma, one of the cheapest tricks in the book. Lucy is also messed up thinking everyone on earth has a poison growing inside their bodies and that is what makes them depressed and mean. Look, you peddler of small-press filth, you can symbolise that and symbolise this but what we see is a whole lot of appalling violence against cows! It shouldn’t matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose, after all, is to shock—but somehow it does.

And then there is Lucy, Steven's semi-girlfriend who is obsessed with finding the black tumors and pus that are hidden in every living being.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. 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.

Things that occur – animal abuse and torture, self mutilation, matricide, infanticide, beastiality, scat play and ingestion and homicide just to name a few. Another way to put this would be to say that COWS makes a rum mixture of a large number of important provocations: morality, ethics, sexuality, perversity, nihilism, sadism… nearly every concept I have mentioned in this review, including beauty and harmony, is contested. Maybe not to this full extent but the thought that anyone would have to experience any part of these horrors that the main character has to endure is ghastly and unimaginable. But also, the very obvious comment on alpha males needing to be alpha males (because if you're not first you're last).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.

I think that to make headway on this problem of extreme subject matter (or images) it is necessary to distinguish these, and probably others, and consider them one by one.The cows know, as Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, “Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. Maybe because ‘COWS’ read as more of a Bizarro book and ‘Woom’ reads as a horror story centering on a man’s lingering trauma. Steven’s dog named Dog crawls around half paralyzed, legs out like a wheelbarrow, the result of his mother chucking a brick. Lulubelle ; Now, moo if you think his modicum of talent and his shall I say unusual aesthetic justifies him continuing to live! Having to keep the cover hidden on the train in case anyone spotted it and had any idea what it was I was reading was difficult at times.