Holy shit!
That pretty much sums up my reaction to Mathew Stokoe's debut novel, COWS.
The novel is about Steven, a 25-year old who lives a miserable live in a dirty flat with his overweight, dominant mother who tortures him and his dog both physically and through sick mind games. For example she forces him to eat the most disgusting food imagineable, just to see him suffer ... Then, one day, Steven starts a job at the local slaughterhouse and is introduced into a whole other world of dementia. There's Cripps, his boss, who's obsessed with the idea that killing animals is a way to gain power and achieve salvation. Steven is intrigued by this and soon works his way up to a position where he can actually kill the animals instead of just gutting them or grinding their meat. He thinks this may be the way to find the strength the do away with the Hagbeast, which is what he calls his mother. Things do endeed seem to take a turn for the better when he forges as semi-relationship with a girl who lives one floor up from him and who is determined to find lumps of disease in her body to the extent where she makes Steven perform an ad hoc colonoscopy on her. But it is back at the slaughterhouse where things really take a turn for the weird or maybe I should say fucking batshit insane ... Because one night, after having fainted from the exertion of gangbanging a cow carcass with the other workers, an underground organisation of talking cows makes contact with him and introduces him to their world underneath the slaughterhouse ...
I won't write much more for fear of spoiling anything but let me assure you this novel is both intriguing and gross to the point it made me feel slightly sick at times. And I'm a veteran of stuff like Ketchum's Off Season and Edward Lee's The Bighead so that should mean something. If you have a strong stomach and want to read something that is intelligent, horrific, poignant and repellent all at once then I cannot recommend this book strongly enough!
That pretty much sums up my reaction to Mathew Stokoe's debut novel, COWS.
The novel is about Steven, a 25-year old who lives a miserable live in a dirty flat with his overweight, dominant mother who tortures him and his dog both physically and through sick mind games. For example she forces him to eat the most disgusting food imagineable, just to see him suffer ... Then, one day, Steven starts a job at the local slaughterhouse and is introduced into a whole other world of dementia. There's Cripps, his boss, who's obsessed with the idea that killing animals is a way to gain power and achieve salvation. Steven is intrigued by this and soon works his way up to a position where he can actually kill the animals instead of just gutting them or grinding their meat. He thinks this may be the way to find the strength the do away with the Hagbeast, which is what he calls his mother. Things do endeed seem to take a turn for the better when he forges as semi-relationship with a girl who lives one floor up from him and who is determined to find lumps of disease in her body to the extent where she makes Steven perform an ad hoc colonoscopy on her. But it is back at the slaughterhouse where things really take a turn for the weird or maybe I should say fucking batshit insane ... Because one night, after having fainted from the exertion of gangbanging a cow carcass with the other workers, an underground organisation of talking cows makes contact with him and introduces him to their world underneath the slaughterhouse ...
I won't write much more for fear of spoiling anything but let me assure you this novel is both intriguing and gross to the point it made me feel slightly sick at times. And I'm a veteran of stuff like Ketchum's Off Season and Edward Lee's The Bighead so that should mean something. If you have a strong stomach and want to read something that is intelligent, horrific, poignant and repellent all at once then I cannot recommend this book strongly enough!
