Stokoe : Okay, okay – look – in Cows, cows are completely symbolic. I mean look, I have them talking – in Cows, cows can talk! Which as you know, in real life, they can’t. Indeed, horror connoisseurs increasingly find themselves in a similar position as mainstream culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: arbitrators of what is “good” and “bad” horror and how writing that relies primarily on The Gross-Out must be inherently “weak” or gratuitous for gratuity’s sake. Cows, Matthew Stokoe’s Social Allegory 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.......... I’m writing this new book on biodiversity loss. And I put in the original draft “intellectual vanity,” and the editor said, “You’re going to offend too many people.” But biodiversity is so important. I’d much rather they spend the money and the scientific effort to keep what we have left alive.

But Willard denies any artistic merit within the book. He follows the trend that many do, that see Matthew Stokoe as a poor writer whose only intention was to cause controversy and sell a few more copies. I love it when malzoans tell people how much they "love" animals, scritching them behind the ears and under the chin as if that justifies their slaughter. My copy of this book is heading immediately to my compost pile, since it is nothing but male cow manure. Of course, that's assuming the vile message inside doesn't taint my garden. To make matters worse Steven is also forced to deal with a talking, plotting Guernsey. The cow, part of a herd that has escaped the slaughter house and now lives in tunnels under the city streets, along with a herd of other cows, wants to convince Steven to help them stop Cripps by killing him. Roxanne: It’s going round all the herds. Some cow from Buxton sent it to me. Concentrate – it’s him – it’s that guy there.This is a book about farming. About a family trying to make a living. And even though – as many, many people have repeatedly mentioned here – they accomplish this by “raising cattle just to slaughter them”, they manage to treat the animals with utmost respect. Yes, the cows and calves get slaughtered when their time comes. But that doesn’t influence the fact that, while they were alive, every single person on this farm gave their everything to make the lives of these animals as comfortable as possible. The Secret Life of Cows is a mixture of musings about ethical farming, things which the owners of Kite's Nest have implemented to better the welfare of their animals, and anecdotes about particular animals. Some of these are amusing, and others quite sweet. For instance, we meet Meg, a calf who learns to climb some very steep steps so that she can spend the night in the granary, 'away from mud and draughts and bullying'. Meg then teaches two of her fellow calves how to climb the stairs too. There is Alice, who is fond of hide and seek. Young writes: 'She would do her best to hide behind a walnut tree but of course she was too big and as soon as she realised I had seen her she would gallop off again and hide behind the next one, and so on until we reached the cow pen.' I’ll be totally honest with you. I might have given this book higher than three stars if not for the fear of what doing so might make people think of me.

Dawn O'Porter's third novel has much in common with Joanna Trollope's latest book, City of Friends. Both follow four women as they navigate the embattled landscape of modern womanhood: the difficulty of juggling a professional career with a fraught personal life, the influence of digital media on women's perception of themselves, the contradictions and conflicts of contemporary feminism. But the political posturing does not come at the expense of humour, which is illustrated in the bovine metaphor that Cam uses when talking about women, individuality and the cultural imperative to procreate. It is such a strong idea that O’Porter uses it for the title of her book, and it neatly sums up her light feminist message: cows needn’t follow the herd. Sara Keating I contract this with the way he views other women, notably the girl who lives above them, and the women he sees on TV. He idolizes them, not for their womanhood or personality, but for the life he feels they can give him. Steven wiles away his days watching his television and dreaming of the life he “should” have had, the life he desperately wants now, the life he’s willing to kill his mother for.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. From watching shows like "The Brady Bunch", "Leave it to Beaver" and other perfect family sitcoms....Steven has built a dream family - but how can he have it if he has been conditioned from birth to be scared of people and crowds from his mother, The Hagbeast. Oh.....just wait till you meet her....... I read this in one sitting and boy was it a wild freakin ride. Yes I gagged and screamed too many times to count, but it's a horror that made me feel something so that's all I ask for. When you separate the gross parts from the underlying story, it's truly a good narrative about the repercussions of abuse and channeling anger to unhealthy outlets, to say the least. Definitely look up trigger warnings and definitely don't eat until you're at least aware of what's going on in this book lol. Why you should buy this: It’s interesting to me that the book I kept thinking of while reading ‘COWS’ was ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Viktor Frankl. ‘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. Stokoe has crafted a story that does have significant depth and had me really thinking and it is an engaging piece of fiction, if you can get past that layer of filth and look for the treasure chest resting at the bottom of the sea. 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.

We all know them. The dog or cat owners who find their pet's daring dos so astounding/ hilarious / ingenious / entertaining / adorable that they corner you for twenty minutes at lunch to tell you endless stories about them. 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.

On Steven's first day we meet Gummy (yeah....we find out why Gummy doesn't have lips or teeth) and Cripps - damn Cripps.....Cripps who has this insatiable sexual fatherly taste towards Steven and gives us soooo many words of wisdom. We also almost meet a strange pair of eyes hidden behind the grate by Steven's work station. Also, you know, kudos to the creativity put into some of the gore in this stuff. The author must really have dug deep into the darkest recesses of his mind to put some of this shit to paper. And to do it while at all times advancing a thrilling story at a good clip - chapeau. But where Trollope’s characters are women in their late 40s, dealing with the consequences of the choices they have made, O’Porter’s women are a generation younger, poised on the cusp of a key decision: whether to have children.