Monday, November 09, 2015


Cows

by Matthew Stokoe

Not sure how I came across this book. Perhaps it was one of those times I was combing through the items on the library's website that were recently reviewed by other patrons. Somehow the descriptions of brutality and grossness and murder and talking cows caught my fancy instead of repulsing me.

I'd meant to copy the blurb off the back cover, which sums up this book so succinctly and better than I could, but I forgot to do so. The story is about a young man who has long suffered under the watchful eye of his horrible mother. He wants a life like the ones he sees on TV but doesn't know how to achieve it. He gets a job at a slaughterhouse (with a strangely lackadaisical attendance policy) and discovers a road to self-actualization through murder — and also talking cows, and bestiality.

The book is mercifully short. Not that it's poorly written, it's just really intense and rather disgusting. It isn't gratuitously or jokingly disgusting, however, like The Baby Jesus Butt Plug. This book is more along the lines of Chuck Palahniuk, perversity and depravity in the service of something literary.


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