Cows

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After the roof got old, he started watching television obsessively, coming to believe that American sitcom families from the fifties led normal lives, and guaging happiness by those standards. Not engrossing because of the shock but because the story is right below the surface of all the atrocities. 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.

Translated and published around the world, his books have set new boundaries in urban horror and gritty, pull-no-punches noir. 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. I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). Before, when she was alone, the dripping accretion of neuroses in the deep pools of her guts was a rain sound across all of life.If you can stomach reading about most perversities that you can think of, then I would highly recommend COWS.

Now having read this myself, I think understand the kind of responses this short novel has received. Cows too makes most mass market horror look like a crewelwork convention at the convent and this is good; we need more extremely weird novels to kick back at this age of relatively safe, capitalist eye of the needle through which anything artsy is pushed. In visual art, it’s common for students to become interested in extremely violent or disturbing images, such as photos of car crash victims or medical deformities, and to try to use them in their work. The story that Stokoe lays out in Cows is a road map of the development of a hypothetical sociopath murderer. Take a healthy dollop of Horatio Alger (tempered with a dash of Alger Hiss), mix in a good dose of China Mieville's King Rat, a shot of Robert Bloch, add a couple of jiggers of Peter Sotos, ten drams of Camus, two shakes of David Mamet, bung in a couple of PETA ads of the most offensive variety, and then dump the whole mess into a shaker lined with Stewart Home.I can understand readers giving the book one star based on gut reaction or effect or just plain dislike. To me, Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory fell flat because the protagonist’s sadism was justified with childhood trauma, one of the cheapest tricks in the book. Maybe because ‘COWS’ read as more of a Bizarro book and ‘Woom’ reads as a horror story centering on a man’s lingering trauma. Stokoe has continued to explore his uniquely dark view of lives lived in the modern world, and in 2014 was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière – France’s most prestigious crime writing award – for his novel, EMPTY MILE.