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 subway system. It’s a book about abuse, absence of love, and what happens when a person is driven to the point of losing their sanity.

To me, "COWS" is just another experiment in how to override the desensitized limbic system of Americans and Europeans, many of whom have never experienced true trauma and torture, who read stuff like this over their Starbucks espresso, all to squeeze out a dopamine hit sure to generate buzz and a few dollars for the publisher. I foresee drooling adverbs and slippery tongues as antilymphocyte drugs are injected into the pericardium.Not until he rejects that life, or that life rejects him depending on the point of view, and instead accepts something completely different. This novel is hideous in its depravity and beautiful in its understanding of what it means to have nothing left to lose. The cows know, as Orwell wrote in Animal Farm, “Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others.

Lulubelle ; Now, moo if you think his modicum of talent and his shall I say unusual aesthetic justifies him continuing to live!It wasn't my stomach forcing that either, I read the infamous "lunch scene" while literally eating lunch lol, but it was my brain! Often it turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to use such images simply because they are so strong. We can’t say that Steven is the type of main character we want to live within, he’s probably mad too, as in insane, and matching him is every other human in the novel.

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.The plot is sluggish and the gross out factor isn't interesting enough to justify recommending this book to anyone. It’s awkwardly constructed; its inner monologues and dialogues are sometimes awkward and seldom persuasive; it doesn’t respond to the last fifty years of fiction except in glancing allusions to some other extremist authors; and its writing is dull and often mechanical. COWS’ has become a cult classic, much in the way ‘A Serbian Tale’ has for the movie watching community. 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.

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. Daisy (a left-leaning cow) : I believe it neatly encapsulates the human male infantile mindset, the fear and loathing of the mother, the horror of the female power of birth, of creation if you will, and the homo-erotic desire to be a man amongst men and to take charge of your manly destiny, all of which it appears has to be achieved by killing the mother figures.I thoroughly enjoyed many of the witty and creative commentary from readers who felt compelled to talk about this book.