COWS

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 scatological tale of love, self-empowerment and probably the most extreme novel you'll ever read. Hailed around the world as a cult classic, Matthew Stokoe's novel set the bar for gritty urban horror. Mother's corpse in pieces, dead dog on the roof, girlfriend in a coma, baby nailed to the wall, and a hundred tons of homicidal beef stampeding through the subway system. And Steven thought the slaughterhouse was bad . . . "If you enjoy the sensation of your jaw dropping to the floor in a combination of stupefaction, hilarity, and shock, Cows is your book. Matthew Stokoe has written a novel like no other I've ever read--appalling, funny, and possessed of a sense of outre violence that makes Joris-Karl Huysmans read like Louisa May Alcott." --Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest "Underground literary shock-rocker Stokoe (Empty Mile, 2010, etc.) slaps his readers in the face with this bloody, truly disgusting diatribe against normalcy. On the bright side, there’s absolutely no pretense about what the book is aiming for..." --Kirkus Review "Do you like cows? Do you have even a tinge of faith in the goodness of man? If so, skip this relentlessly violent survey of some taboos you've heard of, and hopefully, a few new ones that would never occur to you. ... a phantasmagoria of extreme violence, death, sex, bestiality, self-surgery, torture, and a really, really, really bad mother-son relationship, all of which takes what the marquis de Sade did and pushes it down the road a little farther. Stokoe is an able craftsman, which makes the content all the more horrifying as he blasts through boundaries and finds increasingly twisted ways of making readers squirm." --Publishers Weekly

From Publishers Weekly

Do you like cows? Do you have even a tinge of faith in the goodness of man? If so, skip this relentlessly violent survey of some taboos you've heard of, and hopefully, a few new ones that would never occur to you. The novel follows 25-year-old Steven, who dwells in a faceless American city with his sadistic mother ("the Hagbeast"), his only friend a crippled dog named Dog. His life takes a dramatic turn when he takes a slaughterhouse job and is quickly initiated into the factory's bloody and darkly sexual brotherhood. Then he meets upstairs neighbor Lucy, who is obsessed with vivisection, and starts to believe there may be a ray of light in his otherwise nightmarish life, but what follows is a phantasmagoria of extreme violence, death, sex, bestiality, self-surgery, torture, and a really, really, really bad mother-son relationship, all of which takes what the marquis de Sade did and pushes it down the road a little farther. Stokoe is an able craftsman, which makes the content all the more horrifying as he blasts through boundaries and finds increasingly twisted ways of making readers squirm. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

COWSBy MATTHEW STOKOEAkashic BooksCopyright © 2011 Matthew StokoeAll right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-936070-70-1Chapter One In bed. Steven could feel the toxins tumbling slowly through his bloodstream, jagged black particles that rolled in a slow-motion undersea current, gouging soft tissue with their passing. If he closed his eyes in the dark room he could see a science-book photo of his blood map. Blood, not sticky red liquid, but billions of corpuscles all backlit in a fireside glow, jostling for position in a race to the heart that would love them and pump them down to the lungs for that good, good oxygen. The heart wanted them to live and it cheered on its team with the unshakeable, endlessly enduring love of TV parents. But riding the backs of his corpuscles, leaping onto them from his stomach wall and through the slick gray coils of his intestines, not giving a shit what his heart wanted, the hard black grit of Mama's catabolized meals jammed itself into his flesh and fat and gristle. On his back in the greasy ruck of bedclothes, he could feel the thousand systems of his body clogging with this filth. He turned on his side and looked out at the 3 a.m. city through a single uncurtained window. It didn't work. In the cold gutted room, on the narrow bed wedged into the grudging protection of a corner, he could still feel his body age. He raged at his powerlessness. She forced her mealshit into him day after day and he couldn't stop her. He wanted to. He wanted to tie her legs apart and take a hammer to her cunt then walk out on to the street and never come back. But he couldn't. In the long nights before sleep the TV had no pity. It showed him how the world was. It showed him how much the people out there had. He'd been outside to see for himself, of course, out into the city and walked around. But it was too frightening to stay out for long. He wasn't like the people on the streets. They lived so perfectly. They knew exactly what to do to be happy and they did it without even having to think. And the TV beamed their lives into his head as dreams. Across the bare floorboards, in a patch of sick orange light, Dog lay sleeping, its paralyzed back legs out stiff like the handles of a wheelbarrow. Steven closed his eyes. At the edges of roads all across the world sodium vapor lamps sizzled away at the night, and in the flat upstairs the new girl moved around and spoke to herself. Chapter Two In the mornings, if the water ran hot, Steven could stand for hours in the raw concrete of the shower stall. Like sleep it was an escape. The flow of the water soothed him, threw a cover over his emptiness. It was like the few times he had ridden a bus—without doing anything you were doing something, you were moving, and the movement absorbed you. All the headchatter went quiet and you could imagine you had all the things you saw on TV, like love and a ranch in the forest with a horse and a brand-new Jeep and a child and a wife who loved you and would stroke your cheek when you got home so tenderly that you knew she lived only for you and when you walked through the forest or the city a path opened up and you always knew which direction to take and nothing ever jumped out and stopped you or cut you off from life because you were right in there with it, you were part of it all and you didn't miss out on a thing. And when you looked at the TV it was a mirror. But when Steven stepped out to dry himself with a rag, when his feet hit the scummy stone floor in front of the toilet, nothing had ever changed. Gargantua. The Hagbeast. The unloving mother bitch cunt stood hulked over a two-burner stove, stirring a pan of rancid pork. The kitchen stank of gas and oil and the caked, dead fish decay that came out between her legs. Steven sat at the small unbalanced table and watched Dog drag itself across the sticky linoleum to the shit tray. Its useless hind feet swished sideways with each lurching foreleg step, like the tail of some broken fish. He'd had it from a pup—nine years—and had been there, standing impotent and frozen, when the Hagbeast crippled it with a brick. For no reason at all. That day in his teens was confirmation of what he had suspected since birth—that he was incapable of manipulating life as other people did. Unlike them he could have no effect on the web of events that surrounded him, he could bring about no change. Dog had looked up at him not savage or pain-snarly but confused, like how could Steven allow this to happen? In those days Dog was young and had not learned how powerless Steven was before the Beast. Out in the hall now, the animal shitted a dark turd into a bed of ripped newspaper. Good boy. Snapped in half and still killing itself to please. The Hagbeast brought breakfast over. "Here, lovey. Mama's best boy, eat that all up." She sat opposite him and slopped chunks of undercooked meat onto his plate. The oil that soaked it was flecked with something that looked like phlegm. "Eat up, eat up. Got to eat Mama's food that she makes just for you, haven't we?" Steven looked at the sagging face, at the crosshatched pouches of fat and the clogged skin, at the ancient blackheads that had grown with the years, outward like the rings of a tree. The gray hair on her jowls lay flat under the crusted remains of a thousand meals and she had snot on her upper lip. He summoned his courage. "I can't eat this." He prodded the food with his fork, dropping his eyes, wanting to challenge her but unable to bear the terror of her gaze. The Hagbeast sighed and her voice got hard. "Every day. Every day the same fucking thing. I made this food with love, Steven, and I want you to eat it." She made a fist around her spoon and shoveled in the slop. Her movements were ponderous and inexorable, as though some highly torqued mechanism revolved beneath the lax obesity of her frame. Fat swung in pleats from her upper arms and she breathed heavily through her nose as she chewed. "It's shit. It isn't even cooked properly." The Beast spat out a mouthful of food and started to shriek. "Shit! Shit! You ungrateful fuck. People out there would die to eat this." Steven held tight to the leg of the table and pushed his words out like small boats into the storm of her screaming. "Food like this kills people." "Eat the fucking food!" Her words rang on the filthy tiled walls. In this tight space outside the world their fury silenced the city. She heaved herself upright and stood waiting, daring him to refuse, grunting low in her throat and pressing her teeth together. Steven didn't have the strength to resist further. His fear of the monstrosity before him withered to dust the small store of opposition with which he'd hoped to transform the morning. He speared a piece of the meat with his fork. His stomach rolled, but like every other mealtime he filled his mouth and chewed and swallowed. And kept on doing it until his plate was empty. (Continues...) Excerpted from COWSby MATTHEW STOKOE Copyright © 2011 by Matthew Stokoe. Excerpted by permission of Akashic Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

About the Author

Matthew Stokoe is a novelist whose work has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian and German. In 2014 he was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière - France's most prestigious award for crime and mystery writing. He lives with his wife in Sydney, Australia.

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