Cows

Product Information

This site uses cookies to deliver our services, improve performance, for analytics, and (if not signed in) for advertising. If you enjoy the sensation of your jaw dropping to the floor in a combination of stupefaction, hilarity, and shock, Cows is your book. Honestly, it could have been written by a group of 13-year-old boys with a wardrobe full of black trench coats, indulging in a creative-writing circle jerk. In 2014 he was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – France’s most prestigious award for crime and mystery writing. So he goes into the kitchen and tries to find something to make, but he decides that he just can't cook.

Underground literary shock-rocker Stokoe slaps his readers in the face with this bloody, truly disgusting diatribe against normalcy. 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. Steven’s dog named Dog crawls around half paralyzed, legs out like a wheelbarrow, the result of his mother chucking a brick. Maybe because ‘COWS’ read as more of a Bizarro book and ‘Woom’ reads as a horror story centering on a man’s lingering trauma. Stokoe is an able craftsman, which makes the content all the more horrifying as he blasts through boundaries and finds increasingly twisted ways of making readers squirm.There’s no pictures of Matthew Stokoe anywhere – remember we were googling on Clara’s laptop the other day, after milking time? Translated and published around the world, his books have set new boundaries in urban horror and gritty, pull-no-punches noir. It wasn't my stomach forcing that either, I read the infamous "lunch scene" while literally eating lunch lol, but it was my brain!

enormously disturbing and transcendently clever, Cows, a literally eviscerating portrait of life among the British lower classes, is revered internationally as one of the most daring English-language novels of the past few decades. I tried - I really tried and all I could think to compare it to was Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal".

This book left me feeling dirty and worthless, I would have given up but I had the misguided notion that somehow, someway, something was going to happen but it didn't and now I need a really long bleach shower and a hug.

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.Stokoe's in-your-face prose and raw, unnerving scenes give way go a skillfully plotted tale that will keep readers glued to the page. 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. Stokoe doesn’t seem to have thought about the fragmented consciousness of Naked Lunch, or the ecstatic prejudices and violence of Céline.

Christine : Well, hold on there human boy, I’m not saying I subscribe to your scatological taboo-busting testosterone-fuelled steampunk gorefest. There's no reason for a story when the reader can barely get through a sentence without puking their guts out, right?Steven sickens slowly, holed up in his room, watching perfect lives on TV, dreaming of what it would be like to be safe, to be happy, to be loved. 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. 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. One of the most outrageous, original and insightful books ever written on the subject of alienation and societal decay, COWS is a violent, blood-soaked nightmare - a tale of love, self-empowerment and talking cows. Why, in the 21st century, should the extremely violent, the extremely disturbing, the extremely repulsive need to be aestheticized?