Tony Degan's Reviews > Cows

Um....

Definitely the most disturbing book I've personally ever read. Stokoe really must have collected every kind of situation, description, or action that is disturbing to a human being--all flavors. Rape, murder, bestiality, abortion, self-harm, um... bodily fluids?, abuse--literally everything under the sun.

I guess it's pretty inclusive in that way. No one is safe.

There are more than a few points where the scene is legitimately hard to read. One bit near the middle made me feel like vomiting. I'm not kidding.

Aside from all that, the book is actually pretty well written. The diction chosen to describe all these horrible situations really manages to paint a VIVID picture in your head. There's lots of subtext happening connecting the protagonist's mother, his "girlfriend", his lovely and not at all H.R. violating boss, and the cows in the slaughter house.

It seems like a bit of a dream, or a nightmare--more realistically, that the protagonist is trapped in. The depictions of abuse from his mother and his reactions to what she does to him were quite hard-hitting and real (being someone who's experienced abuse myself). That is to say that anything and everything is hyperbolized here. I've never been more repulsed by the description of a character as I was with the mother. Her physical traits and qualities were enough to make you gag--and that's excluding her behavior.

My critique would be that I was confused at points how any of this crazy shit is happening and not being investigated by the police. No one else in any other apartment can hear (or smell) any of this? And what happens at the slaughter house almost reads totally like a dream or some kind of hallucination, most notably when the talking cows get introduced.

And when a certain individual gets killed--not to spoil anything--the place just keeps running as per usual? Stuff like that makes me think his job must be some kind of hallucination altogether.

And when (view spoiler)[ the police show up at the end of the book, that confirms that this was all real, provided the police are real of course. (hide spoiler)] So either the police in the UK are numbnuts, or everyone in the apartment and the slaughter house are numbnuts to allow any of this to take place.

I wouldn't say what I just touched on takes away from the book, as it kind of gives it a dreamlike oddity that works with the absolute mindfuck of everything else.

Would I recommend it? If you prepare yourself and understand what you're getting into (and I don't say that lightly), then there is an interesting story here with incredibly disturbing, almost non-human characters who embody the basest and most vile qualities of humanity. It's not a book I'll forget--that's for damn sure. And for any writers out there, it's a great study in writing vivid and cringe-inducing violence and grime. The emotions it can bring out are more nuanced than I was expecting.

Good job, Matthew Stokoe. I hope you have a good therapist.