Also, you know, kudos to the creativity put into some of the gore in this stuff. The author must really have dug deep into the darkest recesses of his mind to put some of this shit to paper. And to do it while at all times advancing a thrilling story at a good clip - chapeau. COWS is exceptionally well-written and flows beautifully from chapter to chapter. The characters, with the exception of Steven, are very unlikable. Cripps, who works with Steven at the meat plant is especially despicable. I think that was needed to move the story in the direction it went.

Christine (a bespectacled cow with a chic French look) : You know, I hate to say this, but he’s not entirely wrong. It’s pretty simplistic to see this guy’s novel either as a cry of protest against modern urban debovinisation or on the other hand as an Eating Animals Safran Foer- style polemic. In fact, it’s neither. But what happens when horror isn’t just one step ahead? What if it’s two? Three? What if it’s ten? The Horror Novel Horror Readers Hate: Cows Alas despite the decent treatment and freedom these creatures get, they still end up being butchered. To make matters worse Steven is also forced to deal with a talking, plotting Guernsey. The cow, part of a herd that has escaped the slaughter house and now lives in tunnels under the city streets, along with a herd of other cows, wants to convince Steven to help them stop Cripps by killing him.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. I guess my biggest struggle with this book, and it appears to be the same thing for a lot of reviewers, is how Young talked so lovingly of these cows all the way through but in the end, she slaughtered them anyway. That feels bizarre to me. Factory farmers don’t care about the animals so there is no feeling there when they are killed. With Young, she talked about these cows as though they were pet dogs. You wouldn’t kill your pet dog! It just didn’t sit right with me and I can assure you it still wouldn’t have if I was still eating meat. The book, though enjoyable in its way, was not what I think of as a good book. I thought too much of the 'secret life' was fanciful and not at all credible. And I speak from a point of view of knowledge. I know cows as cows who are not subject to people at all, I've been observing 'wild' ones for decades, mostly in my garden where they eat what they fancy every now and again. (They like psychedelic magic mushrooms but I've not seen if they get high or not on them). Cows are not farmed in farms here, the farmer lets the gardens of the whole island feed them and they just cull the baby bulls, the cows are free to live out their lives until old age weakens them, then they too go to the abbatoir. Man : How would you know what I – Matthew Stokoe looks like? There’s no pictures of me – him – anywhere! Not on the internet, not anywhere! Roxanne: Don’t come the innocent with us, sunshine. You’re Matthew stokoe, author of the notorious novel Cows. Which we have read. And we’re cows, as you may have noticed.

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. MyHome.ie (Opens in new window) • Top 1000 • The Gloss (Opens in new window) • Recruit Ireland (Opens in new window) • Irish Times Training (Opens in new window) Author Rosamund Young runs Kite's Nest Farm, on the edge of the Cotswolds, with her brother and partner. She has lived on the farm since her childhood, and has been observing the animals ever since. Her ethos is admirable; they let the cows decide when they wish to finish weaning, allow them to live in mixed generational groups to give the younger members the opportunity to learn from their elders, and give the animals constant access to food and water. Young writes: 'We decided that the animals themselves are by far the most qualified individuals to make decisions about their own welfare and it is the decisions they make, as well as many other occurrences both humdrum and extraordinary, that I have observed, learned from and written down here.' Young then goes on to elaborate further, explaining that she and her colleagues 'have tried on this farm to create an environment that allows all of the animals the freedom to communicate with or dissociate themselves from us as they choose.' Throughout, she makes highly thoughtful points; for instance: 'Just because we are not clever enough to notice the differences between individual spiders or butterflies, yellowhammers or cows is not a reason for presuming that there are none.' But Willard denies any artistic merit within the book. He follows the trend that many do, that see Matthew Stokoe as a poor writer whose only intention was to cause controversy and sell a few more copies.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. 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. But Steven is surrounded by violence and clinically insane people. His mother, the Hagbeast, Cripps the predator and crazy Lucy.

I thought the cow’s story needed retelling, because we got into a position where we were accepting that the cow is almost an unmitigated evil in terms of health, biodiversity, and emissions. It’s like we’ve forgotten our manners. The word is out that Cows is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Banks' classic The Wasp Factory. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written."This was a very different kind of read for me and while I'm really happy I branched out and gave this one a go, I'm disappointed by the book in general. There were definitely some good takeaways from it but the whole thing overall left me feeling a bit strange and unsatisfied.