Cows [Paperback]

Matthew Stokoe (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1999

The most extreme cult novel of the decade - finally in paperback!

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Do you like cows? Do you have even a tinge of faith in the goodness of man? If so, skip this relentlessly violent survey of some taboos you've heard of, and hopefully, a few new ones that would never occur to you. The novel follows 25-year-old Steven, who dwells in a faceless American city with his sadistic mother ("the Hagbeast"), his only friend a crippled dog named Dog. His life takes a dramatic turn when he takes a slaughterhouse job and is quickly initiated into the factory's bloody and darkly sexual brotherhood. Then he meets upstairs neighbor Lucy, who is obsessed with vivisection, and starts to believe there may be a ray of light in his otherwise nightmarish life, but what follows is a phantasmagoria of extreme violence, death, sex, bestiality, self-surgery, torture, and a really, really, really bad mother-son relationship, all of which takes what the marquis de Sade did and pushes it down the road a little farther. 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. (Feb.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Review

BSE was never this mad. A stomach-churning read...a 'Wasp Factory' for the '90's. -- D.Tour

Forget Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z Brite, and Dennis Cooper. That's kid's stuff. If you want something truly repellent, try this. -- Gay Times

Stokoe's vision of Hell is a carnivore's nightmare. A powerful and all-too possibly prophetic work. -- Kathy Acker

The word is out that Cows is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Bank's classic 'The Wasp Factory'. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written. -- Kerrang!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: The Tears Corporation/Creation (October 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1840680059
• ISBN-13: 978-1840680058
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,092,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

44 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gruesome Beyond Reason, June 12, 2003

By 

Jeffrey Leach (Omaha, NE USA) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cows (Paperback)

Whooo Hoooo! This has got to be the most intense book I have ever read. I know I say that with the regularity of a chiming clock, but "Cows" by Matthew Stokoe really takes the cake. Creation Books apparently prints some other extreme titles, probably ones that may be even more visceral than this one, but Stokoe's devastating portrait of a man's need to belong is simply unforgettable. The author has another novel out, called "High Life," that promises to be as unsettling as this story. It may be some time before I muster the necessary fortitude to read that one, though. Yes, "Cows" is that disturbing. There is a warning label on the back cover of the book, if that tells you anything.

"Boy meets Cow," trumpets the back cover, but that is only part of the story. "Cows" relates the pathetic story of Steven, a down on his luck, alienated man living in a disheveled tenement building in England. Steve lives with his dear old mum, a woman so repulsive in appearance and manner that her son refers to her as the "Hagbeast." Our protagonist despises this woman to such an extreme, with a mutual feeling on the part of his mother, that he spends his days and nights in bed with Dog (his crippled pet dog) plotting how to break free from her controlling influences. He is even convinced that his mother is trying to kill him through the obnoxious meals she forces him to eat everyday. There isn't much chance of this momma's boy shedding his chains, as he consistently caves in under his sick whims. The only options for eventual freedom arrives in the form of his new job at the packinghouse and through a potential love affair with Lucy, a girl who lives upstairs.

Problems with these hopes quickly emerge. Lucy is, well, completely insane. She spends her days obsessing about the poisons building up inside every human being. By watching videos of operations and through painful self-examinations, Lucy hopes to discover the location of these internal toxins in order to remove them from her own body. Steven recognizes Lucy's illnesses but fervently hopes that he can create a world where the two will live together, have a child, and mirror the perfect family world he sees on his television set every night. In the meantime, Steve will have to deal with his mother and work at the packinghouse so he can earn money to actualize his visions.

Then there is the job at the slaughterhouse. Steven quickly falls in with Cripps, the head supervisor in the room where they actually kill the cattle. This aberrant human being recognizes Steven's lack of character and starts to indoctrinate him with philosophies about how killing animals imbues men with power in all the other avenues of their lives. Adding to the general madness is the discovery by Steven of a rogue herd of talking cows living underneath the city. These cows escaped from the oily clutches of Cripps and his fellow thugs and are now seeking revenge against the evil men working on the killing floor. Which path will Steven choose? Will he accept Cripps's nauseating, fascistic visions or will he work with the talking cows and purge the world of an evil human being?

Turning a page in this book is like repeatedly dropping an anvil on your head. You are not certain of what you will find on the next page, but you soon discover that it will be so far over the top as to defy description. "Cows" encompasses nearly every anti-social behavior imaginable. There are scatological excesses galore, mind-blowing violence, weirdness on a metatectonic level, and stark examinations of power relationships. There is a message in "Cows," but the crushing amount of gore nearly buries it under a mountain of ground beef.

This is a story about dreams and how environment can crush those gossamer longings. Steven wants to live; he wishes he had a caring mother, a beautiful and loving wife, a nice house, a child, and all the amenities of modern life. He sees the images on television depicting a perfect life and thinks he can achieve these things in his own existence. His difficulties in connecting to society in no way lessen his desire to do so. Steven's internal condition is so fragile and fragmented that he is an easy target for the likes of Cripps, who promises self-realization and authenticity through violence if Steven will only take the plunge. One problem comes when Steven thinks he can save Lucy as well as himself. When his visions of perfection come apart at the seams, when one action towards living the dream requires greater and more violent actions to sustain them, Steven disintegrates and becomes something worse than even Cripps and everything is lost. It does not help that Steven's ideals are built on an illusion anyway, namely the vacuous world of television. He is doomed from the start without even realizing it.

This book does not have a happy, fairy-tale ending. It is rather a series of painful, tentative steps by a man who desperately needs something to live for. I commend Stokoe for weaving such a penetrating vision in a quickly read story. I do not, however, have warm feelings for the passages that almost made me bolt for the bathroom. I have an iron stomach, but "Cows" nearly did me in. Only the stoutest souls need crack the cover on this book.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Staring vacantly into space repeating best...book...ever..., June 21, 2004

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Cows (Hardcover)

Matthew Stokoe, Cows (Creation Books, 1997)

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.

Cows is also visionary, brilliant, amazingly complex, a must on my ten best reads of the year list, and the second full-length piece of fiction I have finished in less than twenty-four hours this year. It's not only so nasty you can't look away, but it is supremely, blindingly great.

Matthew Stokoe's debut novel can best be summarized as follows. Take a healthy dollop of Horatio Alger (tempered with a dash of Alger Hiss), mix in a good dose of China Mieville's King Rat, a shot of Robert Bloch, add a couple of jiggers of Peter Sotos, ten drams of Camus, two shakes of David Mamet, bung in a couple of PETA ads of the most offensive variety, and then dump the whole mess into a shaker lined with Stewart Home. Shake, chill, and serve over ice cubes laced with LSD, rat poison, and Hideshi Hino films. One taste and you have scraped the tip of the iceberg that is Cows.

Steven, the protagonist, is not a happy person. His paraplegic dog, named Dog, was crippled years back by his mother, known affectionately throughout as the Hagbeast. 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. After the roof got old, he started watching television obsessively, coming to believe that American sitcom families from the fifties led normal lives, and guaging happiness by those standards. As the novel opens, Steven is on his way to his first day of work, ever, at a slaughterhouse. He has a new upstairs neighbor named Lucy, who just moved in and after whom he lusts, a foreman named Cripps who takes maybe a bit too much of a fatherly interest in Steven, and something watching him from the ventilation system in the slaughterhouse.

As if that's not enough, Lucy is convinced that all the poisons in human beings (mucous, excrement, etc.) are to be found in large black lumps mixed in with the organs, and ceaselessly dissects things trying to find them; Steven is convinced the Hagbeast is trying to kill him by feeding him undercooked pork; the thing in the vents is getting more insistent; Cripps wants to teach Steven the ins and outs of cow-killing. Life, to say the least, is a mess for Steven, until everything falls into place at once and he begins to understand who he really is.

On the surface, Cows is an exceptionally offensive novel. It doesn't take too much analysis, though, to realize that the offense here is aimed with a deadly precision, and Stokoe weighed every word carefully in order to smack the reader into wakefulness throughout. Once you've understood that, unearthing the subtleties underneath becomes that much easier. Steven is a fantastically-drawn character whose emotions are never less than real (though as Guernsey tells him, there's nothing at all normal about Steven; that we can identify with him at all is a work of literary mastery). The rest of the characters are all caricatures of some sort (one is tempted to map them onto the seven deadly sins in a piece of textual analysis), but despite this are are very well presented and, with the exception of the Hagbeast (who is drawn as completely evil) empathetic; Cripps may be a power-hungry perverted moron, but there's enough of the father figure in him for us to see him, briefly, as Steven must after first meeting him, for example. The situations and the characters are all throughly blown out of proportion, but the grittiness with which Stokoe sets his scenes makes his dystopian vision as real to the reader as the backdrops of Ridley Scott's marvelous film Balderunner.

None of this is truly astounding; many of the same strengths can be found in much of Creation's output (these same strengths, for example, are what make Pantziarka's House of Pain so much more readable than Jeremy Reed or the erotic novels of Anne Rice, for example). Where Stokoe truly transcends is in the tenderness with which he treats Steven's odd love triangle, and the subtle power struggle between Steven and Guernsey through the latter half of the novel. Ultimately, whatever the message one takes away from the book (the late Kathy Acker, for excample, brandished it as a banner for the vegan movement), at its core are those relationships.

You will either love Cows or hate it. You will emerge from it disgusted, mystified, or both. But you will not read Cows and finish it unchanged. D>Tour magazine called Cows "the Wasp Factory of the nineties." Whether Stokoe will achieve the same status that Banks has is a long way from being seen, but it is impossible to deny that Cows is a deeply moving, very important novel that should not be missed. (...)

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Jesus this book is disgusting, March 14, 2005

By 

Dying in August "Junkie" (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Cows (Paperback)

At this point this is the most gruesome book I have ever read. I knew it would be gross when I started reading it, however I did not realize just how gross it would be. There was a scene which seriously made me gag over the toilet (literaly) and I have a high tolerance for this kind of stuff. Part of the reason was because the writing style is great, very literary yet easy to read. It was easy to become immersed in the world. However, I never fully connected to the character. In some ways I could understand his emotions, but in other ways his actions were just too irrational to make complete since. There was a fairy tale quality to part of the story and I really enjoyed this aspect of it. It added to the surreal environment without letting up on the grue factor. If you have a strong stomach and like your literature on the extreme or strange side then I recommend this book. Seriously though if you have a low tolerance for the disgusting steer far clear from this book.