Cows

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It shouldn’t matter that the resulting artwork is harmonious—the purpose, after all, is to shock—but somehow it does. I will mention just one: the main character breaks off his mother’s teeth, fixes his anus over her bleeding mouth, and shits, forcing her to eat. 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. Likewise if I allocated stars on how widely read I think a book ought to be, would this get five stars there? Often it turns out to be unexpectedly difficult to use such images simply because they are so strong.

It’s pretty simplistic to see this guy’s novel either as a cry of protest against modern urban debovinisation or on the other hand as an Eating Animals Safran Foer- style polemic. Stokoe does a masterful job of showing various forms of mental health issues and how Steven, while suffering through his own issues, keeps trying to find hope and positivity.

And despite page after page of awfulness, there is a kind of harsh beauty buried within and that comes not from the story but from Matthew Stokoe's language and authorial skill. 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 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! 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.

When Steven gets a job at the local slaughterhouse, a door is unlocked in his brain and he begins to find the pieces he needs to put the puzzle together towards the ideal life he so desperately craves. 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. It smashes the walls you put around yourself, the walls other people put around you to stop you doing what you want.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. Still others ranked this one star or five depending on their emotional state upon writing their review.