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. Alas despite the decent treatment and freedom these creatures get, they still end up being butchered. Det er en fin lille bog, og der er mange gode fortællinger, men jeg nåede også til at punkt, hvor jeg var lidt mættet i de mange historier fra Kite’s Nest. Jeg savnede mere videnskabelig opbakning og konkrete fakta, men jeg anerkender samtidig også, at det netop er narrativet, der gør den lille bog til noget ganske særligt. Den er både vedkommende og tankevækkende og introduktionen burde være pligtlæsning for enhver.

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? Mother's corpse in bits, dead dog on the roof, girlfriend in a coma, baby nailed to the wall, and a hundred tons of homicidal beef stampeding through the tube system. And Steven thought the slaughterhouse was bad... Gloria : Oh, come on now, you’re obsessed. How would you know? There’s no pictures of Matthew Stokoe anywhere – remember we were googling on Clara’s laptop the other day, after milking time? Not one picture, and there’s none on any of his books like most human authors do. And when you actually read this filth, you can quite see why. Moo. I’m writing this new book on biodiversity loss. And I put in the original draft “intellectual vanity,” and the editor said, “You’re going to offend too many people.” But biodiversity is so important. I’d much rather they spend the money and the scientific effort to keep what we have left alive.Roxanne: It’s going round all the herds. Some cow from Buxton sent it to me. Concentrate – it’s him – it’s that guy there.

Forget it....You can't kill without getting infected. It don't have the effect Cripps says, but it gets under your skin in other ways. We warned you." On Steven's first day we meet Gummy (yeah....we find out why Gummy doesn't have lips or teeth) and Cripps - damn Cripps.....Cripps who has this insatiable sexual fatherly taste towards Steven and gives us soooo many words of wisdom. We also almost meet a strange pair of eyes hidden behind the grate by Steven's work station. 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." But the political posturing does not come at the expense of humour, which is illustrated in the bovine metaphor that Cam uses when talking about women, individuality and the cultural imperative to procreate. It is such a strong idea that O’Porter uses it for the title of her book, and it neatly sums up her light feminist message: cows needn’t follow the herd. Sara KeatingThe most thought-provoking elements of the book are Cam's blog posts, which crystallise a variety of topical arguments in popular culture that O'Porter engages with regularly in her columns for Glamour magazine, among other publications.

Steven recognizes this is insane – yet the reality of a “normal life” is too much of a draw for him. Instead of getting her help, which I believe he is cognizant enough to have done, he draws her deeper into his vision of familial life and blames her when the seeds he’s painstakingly planted bare no fruit. linguistically attempting to highlight the overall message of how individual ALL animals are (if given a chance to develop) and Do you think factory farms are the main reason why cows get a reputation as being harmful for the environment? 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: CowsAt Kite’s Nest Farm, Rosamund Young sees all her animals in a very different way, and her cows hold a special place in her heart. Each cow is named and rather than being forced to stay in a single field, they are allowed to roam freely around the farm so they can find the best grass or shelter as necessary. This freedom, coupled with the fact they there are not treated as commodities, means that their own personalities shine through. Her observations have shown that they are capable of forming life-long friendships, can hold grudges, play games when younger and grieve when another in the herd dies and in their own way can communicate with us mere humans.

Please be aware that this article contains triggering subject matter. While key plot points have been omitted, severely disturbing material is alluded to. I’m vegetarian myself, but I don’t have an issue with others eating meat. I just think everyone should take a minute to think about what they’re consuming and make better choices. Try and buy locally and organic etc. This is something I thought this book might touch on a little, as the author herself owns a farm, but it was far more about what cows are like as animals, which was totally fine! Until she started anthropomorphising them to the extreme! I can't help but find allegory here for our modern life. We in Western society are so numb to violence, so used to being lied to in our media, so used to extremes in our entertainment, that we behave as those living in war-torn nations. There is an apathy and numbness in even the most privileged of us that drives us to further instant dopamine hits from our social media and from our fentanyl-laced heroin.

I am one of the few. The very few. The absolute select few. I read Matthew Stokoe’s novel Cows and finished it. I am one of the even fewer, the fewest of the few, the almost singular, in that I believe that even though the words written are more disgusting than few authors dare to go, each scene they construct is intended as a cultural reflection. I was recommended this book and thought "What the Hell?" and then it was pointed out to me that it was in a genre called "Bizzaro Fiction"....so my nosey mind just had to look up what it meant and all the other books which fell into this. So picture me on a Friday at work...just adding book after book to my TBR shelf! There are only 13 or 14 species of megafauna that humans have ever found a use for. So if you’re an animal and humans don’t have a use for you, your time on the earth is not going to be very long. It’s interesting how your TBR can conspire against you to bring similarly themed/content books together. Recently I read ‘Tender is the Flesh’ by Agustina Bazterrica. This was followed by the ‘Twisted Anatomy’ anthology through Sci-Fi and Scary. Meanwhile, I was also diving into ‘COWS’ by Matthew Stokoe. All three featured similar moments of wretched repulsiveness, while all three had great depths of philosophical ideas buried beneath the grotesque content. Steven is our protagonist, who is 25 years old and has never left his house except from the roof and after that got too much, then from his television. From watching shows like "The Brady Bunch", "Leave it to Beaver" and other perfect family sitcoms....Steven has built a dream family - but how can he have it if he has been conditioned from birth to be scared of people and crowds from his mother, The Hagbeast. Oh.....just wait till you meet her.......