It’s awkwardly constructed; its inner monologues and dialogues are seldom persuasive; it doesn’t respond to the last fifty years of fiction except in glancing allusions to some other extremist authors; and its writing is often mechanical. Cows is a book written to be revolting and if that doesn’t whet your appetite you’d be best to avoid it. We can’t say that Steven is the type of main character we want to live within, he’s probably mad too, as in insane, and matching him is every other human in the novel. But there are cows living under the city, and when they come for Steven, he sets his sights a whole lot higher.

And despite page after page of awfulness, there is a kind of harsh beauty buried within and that comes not from the story but from Matthew Stokoe's language and authorial skill. Fortunately, a new job at the local slaughterhouse introduces him to Cripps, an insane foreman who preaches the gospel of self-empowerment through killing. There’s no pictures of Matthew Stokoe anywhere – remember we were googling on Clara’s laptop the other day, after milking time? 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. Cows then, as an exploitation novel deserves it’s own place in the sun, h’mm let me figure, Guernseyploitation?A couple of ideas I found interesting: what both Cripps and his acolyte Steven are lacking entirely is remorse.

If you can stomach reading about most perversities that you can think of, then I would highly recommend COWS. It showed that while "COWS" used "WOWS" to attract curious readers eager to test their mettle, something about the work stuck with them, made them think about it more deeply beyond the emotional impact of the cheap shock.This is satire - this book is one big satire that each person who reads it will come out with a different message from the person next to them. Steven is our protagonist, who is 25 years old and has never left his house except from the roof and after that got too much, then from his television. COWS’ has become a cult classic, much in the way ‘A Serbian Tale’ has for the movie watching community. The story that Stokoe lays out in Cows is a road map of the development of a hypothetical sociopath murderer.

Why, in the 21st century, should the extremely violent, the extremely disturbing, the extremely repulsive need to be aestheticized?One last piece of advice: If someone talks to you about this book and tells you it did not shock them or it wasn’t all that rough, don’t ever speak to them again. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. 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. Matthew Stokoel has the ability to create a profound satire mixed in with cannibalism, bestiality, gore, sexual perversion, abuse, self mutilation. It wasn't my stomach forcing that either, I read the infamous "lunch scene" while literally eating lunch lol, but it was my brain!