Cows

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If you can stomach reading about most perversities that you can think of, then I would highly recommend COWS. As I mentioned, if you can dig down through the horrid scenarios, this books has some redeeming qualities. It’s awkwardly constructed; its inner monologues and dialogues are 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 often mechanical.

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. When these three are used together, the effects are disorienting partly because they are mixed in ways that are hard to separate. Before, when she was alone, the dripping accretion of neuroses in the deep pools of her guts was a rain sound across all of life.One of the most outrageous, original and insightful books ever written on the subject of alienation and societal decay, COWS is a violent, blood-soaked nightmare - a tale of love, self-empowerment and talking cows. I can understand readers giving the book one star based on gut reaction or effect or just plain dislike. 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. For sheer originality, uniqueness of vision, and bravura storytelling, and the fact that it has the impact of a freight train, this book most certainly gets five stars from me. Not until he rejects that life, or that life rejects him depending on the point of view, and instead accepts something completely different.

Christine : Well, hold on there human boy, I’m not saying I subscribe to your scatological taboo-busting testosterone-fuelled steampunk gorefest. I thoroughly enjoyed many of the witty and creative commentary from readers who felt compelled to talk about this book.To me, Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory fell flat because the protagonist’s sadism was justified with childhood trauma, one of the cheapest tricks in the book.

Stokoe’s writing is very good in that it will make the reader privy to the delusions and pressures within the character’s mind while almost making sense of the insane thought processes. Despite its relatively minor length, reading it in one sitting might have you not leaving your shower for the rest of the day, and spreading it out over a week is kind of like staring at the sun. Original review: Look, I’m just gonna cut to the chase: This is, hands down, the most disgusting book I’ve ever read. One of the most unstinting, imaginative, brutal and original contemporary novels ever written about the punishments that come with the prioritization of fame. 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.This book left me feeling dirty and worthless, I would have given up but I had the misguided notion that somehow, someway, something was going to happen but it didn't and now I need a really long bleach shower and a hug. Listen, soon-to-be-trampled author-boy, in the first part of your opus you have your extreme-horror slaughterhouse fun with us cows, and then in the second part, you turn us into a fatuous allegory about fascism, where once again we play the mindless puppets.

In a lot of ways, this is a 5-star book, and in a lot of other ways, it is a 1-star book, so I'm leaving my review at 3. 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.At the end we reflect with the author on all that has happened: “And there has only been horror at the ease of it all, the sickening backward flip of approaching fugue — not the sunrise of a new way to live. 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. The book made me honestly think, and knocked dust off parts of my brain that had long since atrophied from banal reality and controlled responses.