Fortunately, a new job at the local slaughterhouse introduces him to Cripps, an insane foreman who preaches the gospel of self-empowerment through killing.

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. Scott Phillips, author of The Ice Harvest"Word is out that COWS is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Banks' classic The Wasp Factory.Stokoe has covered them in a layer of mud that won’t wash off and each character struggles to act ‘normally’ while battling this unseen poison that has infected them.

Daisy : Well, then again, I can’t ignore the fact that this guy, writing from whatever weird perspective he undoubtedly has, and needing undoubtedly many hundred hours of counselling to figure out his problems, which he clearly has in abundance, actually has talent. I’m going to do my best to stay spoiler free, but I wanted to just say – this is a book that if you need any sort of trigger warning, you’ll not make it very far into it. The cows kept coming, and each one took something from him; shavings of sensitivity, perception, care. Why, in the 21st century, should the extremely violent, the extremely disturbing, the extremely repulsive need to be aestheticized? It showed that while "COWS" used "WOWS" to attract curious readers eager to test their mettle, something about the work stuck with them, made them think about it more deeply beyond the emotional impact of the cheap shock.But we like our Andy Warhol wallpaper and we appreciate the cover art on Pink Floyd’s under-appreciated Atom heart Mother album. From the outset of this heartbreakingly powerful contemporary noir, Stokoe (High Life) gets the reader deeply emotionally invested in his guilt-ridden narrator, Johnny Richardson. Extreme unexpected violence is repellent in one way; perversity works differently; and visceral repulsion is partly another matter. Likewise if I allocated stars on how widely read I think a book ought to be, would this get five stars there? Certainly this book, with its nonstop brutality and descriptions of repulsive sensory experiences, attempts to desensitize the reader much as the main character in this story becomes desensitized and becomes a serial killer.

We the readers quickly find out the extremes with which the mother torments her son; after a lifetime of this, Steven is left nearly powerless. The only redeeming thing about this book is that it's short, so you don't waste a huge amount of your life screaming, "This is so stupid! I don't read splatter or extreme stuff very often, but this is one of the few examples where the gratuity informed the message.After COWS, Stokoe turned his sights on Hollywood, producing the now-famous HIGH LIFE – both a page-turning mystery and one of the most brutal critiques of Tinsel Town ever committed to fiction. Matthew Stokoel has the ability to create a profound satire mixed in with cannibalism, bestiality, gore, sexual perversion, abuse, self mutilation. Why should the extremely violent, the extremely disturbing, the extremely repulsive need to be aestheticized?