The Cows

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Think whatever made it move is happy now in the fields of the hereafter? You believe in that kind of thing? Forget it. Meat doesn't have the brains.It just works till it dies or until someone cuts it up." 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. I don't think Matthew Stokoe wanted to convey a particular message, or to be sensational. In my opinion he had an idea, then gave free rein to his imagination. This book is very brutal, gory, immoral, disturbing, disgusting, in short eviscerating. And more importantly, it’s very well written and coherent. I couldn’t put it down. His simple, spare style ("A respect has come between us that was never there before. It is a small and delicate thing, still fragile") occasionally tips over, repetition creating strain rather than strength ("It was a moment from history. And a moment of history"). At times, the language made me curious as to who The Cow Book's intended audience really is. Lines such as "'Oíche mhaith, Ma,' I say, which is the old language for 'goodnight'" strike an uncomfortably discordant note coming from a well-travelled Irishman who is not yet 30.

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 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 sometimes 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. (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.) For a contemporary artist it shouldn’t necessarily matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose of choosing strong images, after all, is seldom to produce a pleasing or harmonious effect—but somehow it does. Despite the aesthetics of discontinuity and collage instituted by postmodernism, despite a half-century of work done without interest in aesthetic effect, we still find that very strong images don’t work as fine art unless they are elaborately contextualized, made to work aesthetically. It’s a puzzle that we still want our art, in these cases, to be nominally harmonious and coherent. And it’s interesting that given all the pressure contemporary artists face to be avant-garde, difficult, new, politically visible, strong, or persuasive, and in general to stand out against a crazily crowded field—that given all that, it’s interesting that the very strongest images are not more commonly used. In a decaying apartment: a mother, a son and a paralysed dog. Monstrously fat and murderously driven, referred to only as The Hagbeast, the mother employs her own unique version of dinnertime cuisine as she attempts to bring about the demise of her only child.​ In the apartment upstairs Lucy spends her nights searching for the toxins she knows are collecting inside her body, desperate to rid herself of them. When she enlists Steven's help to manipulate a piece of invasive medical apparatus, he begins to see that a better life might indeed be possible. Lucy could be his partner, they could make a home together, they could have a baby. They could be just like the folks on TV.​ Another way to put this would be to say that COWS makes a rum mixture of a large number of important provocations: morality, ethics, sexuality, perversity, nihilism, sadism… nearly every concept I have mentioned in this review, including beauty and harmony, is contested. But that observation is just another form of the puzzle I mentioned at the beginning: why, if a book manages to combine all these, is it not more or less automatically an important book? 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.Unfortunately, I didn't see it. Perhaps I should have gone into it more blind. But I don't think it would have made any difference. First of all, I could not pinpoint any messages or themes in this novel that said anything that hadn't been said by 1997 less crudely and graphically but with more emotional impact. I felt like I was treading in familiar territory. Perhaps that is because I also have been a lifelong listener of some of the darker subgenres of industrial music, such as power electronics, which highlights sensory experiences otherwise abrasive and repellent and uses them in a way that somehow captures a bleak psychological concept or story, while also managing to capture the beauty behind the noise. Overall, the story is uplifting and is a celebration of the strength of women, and encourages women to have confidence in their strengths. For me, it fell a little short of its premise, but I think it will appeal to women looking for a new idea on feminism. Interspersed throughout the book are snippets of facts about the history of the cow. I can only imagine that they were introduced at the suggestion of an editor to add some semblance of heft and depth to the proceedings, although they read very much like excerpts from the paper of a bright but lazy undergraduate who's decided to skim Wikipedia and do a bit of paraphrasing. They were irritating enough to tip me over from a two-star rating to a one-star rating. Connell is keen to present himself as someone who's thought deeply about Irish history and myth—the Famine and Cromwell are mentioned more than once; parallels are drawn between the Irish experiences of colonialism and those of Native Americans and Indigenous Australians. Why you should buy this: It’s interesting to me that the book I kept thinking of while reading ‘COWS’ was ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ by Viktor Frankl. ‘COWS’ itself is just that, a young man who longs to break free from the chains that he’s been born into and find happiness and meaning, if only it is an idea of what it should be and should look like. Stokoe has crafted a story that does have significant depth and had me really thinking and it is an engaging piece of fiction, if you can get past that layer of filth and look for the treasure chest resting at the bottom of the sea.

There are some moments of triumph when they show a pure bred bull and we see some sunlight in the very difficult lives. John feels for the animals but a farm is a farm and there is little sentimentality. When an animal does not perform or gets old then it is of no further use and has to go. I received a free digital copy from the author/publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. 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. I had to think, before writing my review. I understand why there is controversy surrounding this book. This book touched me so much, that it took me a while, to put my ideas into place. I loved it!

The Farmer's Son is a memoir of roughly four months in the life of John Connell, the eponymous son, returned to live on his family's farm in Longford after several years in Australia and Canada. Recovering from a bout of depression that had led to the end of a relationship, Connell tends to the cattle and sheep, squabbles with his father, takes up running, and broods. A purer version of COWS could be imagined, for example, in which nothing violent, immoral, psychotic, or perverse takes place, but the world is full of stench, slime, and opportunities for nausea. In that simpler version of COWS, 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. I don't really have an idea how to perform such an analysis, partly because I can see how the ingredients work together to produce the book's effects, and partly because I can't enumerate the kinds of extreme subjects, acts, and descriptions. Are there more than three? Is visceral repulsion separable from moral repugnance? Is there a sexual perversity different from moral perversity? Dawn O’Porter: the accessibility of her writing style will cement The Cows’ popularity. Photograph: Jenny Sharif You know who she reminded me of while reading this book? If you are familiar with Pink Floyd's "The Wall".....and the song "Mother".....yup...that's her - without the maternal loving.....her words to Steven is to call him "cunt" and serve him raw sheep stomach while walking around with her menstrual stains.....yeah - gets pretty descriptive.

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 am an excellent mother, and my daughter will grow up understanding that her own choices are the right choices, no matter what anyone else thinks. That’s the greatest lesson I can teach her.’ But where Trollope’s characters are women in their late 40s, dealing with the consequences of the choices they have made, O’Porter’s women are a generation younger, poised on the cusp of a key decision: whether to have children. Stella is a bit of a mess. She's still dealing with the loss of her identical twin sister and her mother to cancer while also struggling to accept that she has the BRCA gene meaning she has an 85% chance of getting the cancer that killed her family. She's desperate to have a baby and through her loss, comes up with a crazy plan to get one. Few are the gross-out books and movies that properly utilise gore in service of the story. This book is a shining example of how to do it. The wretched set-up is necessary to prime our suspension of disbelief for what is yet to come. Every horrible incident that follows thereafter is a stepping stone on Stephen’s path towards becoming cow Hitler (I don’t know what else to call it). Once he is the one committing the atrocities instead of having them done to him, the gruesome scenes acquire a new timbre; they are stepping stones no more, but milestones in his evolution.The closest thing I’ve read to this would be Danger Slater’s ‘I Will Rot Without You.’ I’ve heard others mention Duncan Ralston’s ‘Woom,’ hell, even Duncan has said he’s not read the book but people say it’s similar to ‘Woom,’ but I didn’t fully make that connection. Maybe because ‘COWS’ read as more of a Bizarro book and ‘Woom’ reads as a horror story centering on a man’s lingering trauma. I loved this book. It was honest and charming. The book traced the relationship between cows and humans in parallel with the return of John to his family's farm in Ireland. This story focusses on three very different women who are initially unconnected, but gradually become a part of each other’s lives due to events that in many ways are out of their control.