But also, the very obvious comment on alpha males needing to be alpha males (because if you're not first you're last).

Look, you peddler of small-press filth, you can symbolise that and symbolise this but what we see is a whole lot of appalling violence against cows!It doesn't matter if you're into Stephen King, Octavia Butler, Jack Ketchum or Shirley Jackson, this is the place to share that love and discuss to your heart's content.

I'm not normally one to preface a review, or even mention in a review, when a book is not appropriate for certain audiences.

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.

I should have known what to expect, as I have read extreme horror and bizarro before, but unlike similar works with reviews that simply state things like "Balls to the wall! Stokoe stays true to a bleak vision of the world as he enmeshes his characters in the kinds of tragic setups reminiscent of a Thomas Hardy novel. Maybe it’s from being a clinician in my real life who deals with amputation and open ulcers frequently, or maybe it’s from having a four year old and a dog and dealing with their messes, I found it was more of a metaphor for the characters lives that Stokoe used those elements. Steven did not bring the sun, a clearing away of this daily torment – his own goals consumed him too entirely – but he was a separate flow of life, a flow into which she could jump and be carried away from her own, thudding back to shore only when she was too tired to stay away from herself.His life takes a dramatic turn when he takes a slaughterhouse job and is quickly initiated into the factory's bloody and darkly sexual brotherhood. You are welcome to take away nothing aside from the whiplash-jetlag-psychadelic comedown once you finish. 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. In that simpler version of COWS, it might be easier to see what kinds of narrative work would need to be done to bring the nauseating elements into dialogue with the rest of the book.

When he is introduced to brutality through his job in a slaughterhouse, he senses a change in his directionless existence. There's no reason for a story when the reader can barely get through a sentence without puking their guts out, right?I can understand readers giving the book one star based on gut reaction or effect or just plain dislike. I knew how violent, bloody, gritty and possibly gross this book was supposed to be but little did I realize it was true. Now I must admit it’s a bit weird to read Cows (2015) and then pick up the pulpy Fevre Dream (1982) by R. 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 (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.