Matthew Stokoe

Reading this novel wasn't a pleasure, it was an experience.

I had heard so much about Cows, the controversial debut novel from Matthew Stokoe, that I figured I had two options: avoid it like the plague, or challenge myself. Despite not being that much of an expert on so-called 'extreme horror,' I decided on the latter.

There is satire within the pages, along with - dare I say it - allegory. But that allegory is buried pretty damn deep, almost hidden away in a morass of squalor, degradation and show more violence. The aforementioned satire is pitch black, and literally smothered in blood, viscera, shit, and all manner of vileness. To use the word 'violent' would be a gross understatement. In my own writing, I tend to focus on squalor and degradation, this however, is a whole other level. Believe everything you might have heard (or should that be herd?). At times, my fevered imagination likened Cows to a deranged version of Animal Farm, if it was rewritten by Terry Gilliam and John Waters, whilst tripping on LSD. It is not for the faint hearted. show less

Wow. I knew how violent, bloody, gritty and possibly gross this book was supposed to be but little did I realize it was true. This book is extreme and not for everyone, probably not even for most people. There were multiple times when I had to pause in my reading to catch my breathe. Or where I cringed in sympathetic pain. Or where I had to simply absorb what I had read before I tried feeding my brain more images and more pain. However, unlike many torture porn horror movies, there was a show more true story here.

Steven is twenty-five years old and living with his mom; it might be better to call it cohabitation since each of them despise the other. We the readers quickly find out the extremes with which the mother torments her son; after a lifetime of this, Steven is left nearly powerless. Afraid of the world, Steven starts his first day at a new job: working at a meat grinding plant. Cripps, the plant foreman, assigns Steven to the grinder while loudly ridiculing everyone for being too weak to slaughter cows for eight-hours until it "sings to you of things beyond yourself." And then there is Lucy, Steven's semi-girlfriend who is obsessed with finding the black tumors and pus that are hidden in every living being.

These pieces all tie together in a sexual, violent, disgusting, bloody fashion that makes for a engrossing read. Not engrossing because of the shock but because the story is right below the surface of all the atrocities. That story is about alienation and trying to fit in to society. Steven understands from TV what life should be, or could be, but he can't reconcile it with his reality. While he removes the roadblocks in his life and muscles the pieces of what should be a perfect life into place, he can't get anything to stay. Not until he rejects that life, or that life rejects him depending on the point of view, and instead accepts something completely different. From that perspective, it is easy to relate to Steven's loneliness. Relating to his life is something I hope no one ever has to do. If you can stomach reading about most perversities that you can think of, then I would highly recommend COWS. But don't push it. I would hate for you to focus only on the the extreme aspects and miss the great story. show less

I was led to this book by various reviews that said things like “the most extreme novel you’ll ever read” (from the back cover copy), “gruesome beyond reason,” “most intense book I have ever read,” “most gruesome book I have ever read,” “I almost felt like I was doing something wrong reading it.” Those are from Amazon, and it’s worth looking on Amazon for the review titled “Most disturbing book ever written. Period.,” posted June 29, 2011. That review is almost as show more off as this book.

The question COWS raises (the book seems to be cited in all-caps, which is appropriate to the way it shouts its perversions and obscenities) have to do with the place of extreme subject matter in art. In visual art, it’s common for students to become interested in extremely violent or disturbing images, such as photos of car crash victims or medical deformities, and to try to use them in their work. Often it turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to use such images simply because they are so strong. A photograph of a man with Ebola just won’t fit with a collage of other images of Africa. Artists who have tried such experiments have found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions. It shouldn’t matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose, after all, is to shock—but somehow it does. Despite the aesthetics of discontinuity, collage, and bricolage instituted by postmodernism, we still find that very strong images don’t work as fine art unless they are elaborately altered and contextualized. It’s a puzzle that we still want our art to be nominally harmonious, coherent, and aesthetic. And it’s interesting that given all the pressure contemporary artists face to be avant-garde, difficult, new, politically visible, strong, persuasive, and in general to stand out against a crazily crowded field—that given all that, it’s somehow not appropriate to use the very strongest images.

COWS is a way of thinking about that. It is not a good novel by a number of standards. It’s awkwardly constructed; its inner monologues and dialogues are sometimes awkward and seldom persuasive; it doesn’t respond to the last fifty years of fiction except in glancing allusions to some other extremist authors; and its writing is dull and often mechanical. He doesn’t seem to have thought about the fragmented consciousness of Naked Lunch, or the ecstatic prejudices and violence of Céline. His rebellion is presented in the mold of simple fictional forms and basic narrative devices.

I don’t think Stokoe is an especially good writer. But the book is more than memorable: it is, I think, entirely impossible to forget. And that is because of things that happen in it. I will mention just one: the main character breaks off his mother’s teeth, fixes his anus over her bleeding mouth, and shits into it, forcing her to eat. What matters in this book is extreme violence, perversity, and repulsion. I think those three shock effects (as Roland Barthes would have called them) are different. Extreme unexpected violence is repellent in one way; perversity works differently; and visceral repulsion is partly another matter. When these three are used together, the effects are disorienting partly because they are mixed in ways that are hard to separate. I think that to make headway on this problem of extreme subject matter (or images) it is necessary to distinguish these, and probably others, and consider them one by one. (Barthes distinguishes five species of photographic “shock.”) A purer version of this book could be imagined, in which nothing violent or perverse happens, but the world is full of stench, slime, and opportunities for nausea. Then it might be easier to see what kinds of narrative work would need to be done to bring the nauseating elements into dialogue with the rest of the book.

This kind of problem has been well studied in the case of de Sade, where repetition plays a central part in the creation of the pornographic effect. But it strikes me a lot more work needs to be done to understand why a book as wildly imaginative and consistently extreme as COWS can be a minor novel, one that doesn’t need to be on the must-read list of everyone interested in contemporary writing. By the same token, more work needs to be done on visual artists like Joel-Peter Witkin to understand why they feel the need to work so hard on their extreme images in order to bring them into the domain of fine art. Why should the extremely violent, the extremely disturbing, the extremely repulsive need to be aestheticized? It has been almost forty years since the inception of the anti-aesthetic, and longer since Duchamp: we have questioned nearly every sense of unity, harmony, and coherence that once existed, not to mention every sense of beauty, decorum, and moderation. So how do we know so clearly that COWS is not an important book? show less

Steven is 25 years old and miserable. He lives with his abusive mother who calls the Hagbeast. She is a disgusting, corpulent, abusive creature who paralyzed his dog (his only friend) and makes his every waking moment there as painful and horrible as possible. He just started working at a slaughterhouse and the job is his only escape from home. His dream is to have a wife, a child, and a normal home like he sees on TV. A woman moves in upstairs named Lucy who is obsessed with surgeries and show more finding poisons inside herself. Steven sees his future with Lucy and just needs to somehow get his mother out of the way, so he plans to kill her. What follows is disturbing, disgusting, and bizarre.

Cows is basically The Human Centipede of books, except that in addition to being completely disgusting and bizarre, it has an actual message. This book is one of the most disgusting and disturbing that I've ever read. Here is a list of things included: bestiality, vivisection, excrement eating, murder, necrophilia, rape, talking cows, infanticide, self surgery, abuse, and cannibalism, among others. I was so happy I didn't eat at all while reading because it made me lose any semblance of appetite I may have had. Despite all its grossness and bizarre situations, parts of the novel are quite funny. Cows is a pitch black satire with a hugely healthy dose of surrealism and the bizarre. Lucy and Steven are weirdly relatable even though they are not even remotely likable. Lucy knows something is wrong with her and can't find it no matter how hard she tries. Steven just wants conventional loved ones and place to call home. Stokoe makes me feel for them and relate to their situations through all of the craziness. Without this element, I don't think I could have finished the book. I read Cows in a couple days. It was kind of like a train wreck that I couldn't bring myself to look away.

I am relieved that this book exists more than just to gross people out. Steven is obsessed with the media's version of a nuclear family. He longs to have a loving mother, a doting wife, beautiful children, a big house, and a successful job. He tries to force people into the roles he dreams of or obliterates them when they don't fit. As he works to build this reality based on illusion, he forgets that Lucy is insane and doesn't really want to have children. After opting to ignore the brewing trouble and completely ignore Lucy and her needs, their relationship implodes in gore. That ideal life portrayed in the media is unattainable for many. Steven learns the hard way that people aren't characters for him to populate his fantasy. He also spent much of his life being dominated and abused by his mother. Instead of overcoming her abuse, he internalized it and became an oppressor on a much wider scale than his mother. He essentially became her and went well beyond her scope of abuse despite viscerally hating her. Because of these issues, and many more, Cows does more than sicken.

Cows is a bizarre novel that requires a strong constitution to read. Avoid it at all costs if you are in any way squeamish. Matthew Stokoe succeeds in creating a abhorrent and memorable story with something real beneath all the layers of various and sundry bodily fluids. The only problem I had with the book was the ending. It was kind of a let down and paled in the face of the rest of the book that was so extreme and in your face. show less