They are hard to find, though, and the book is most assuredly not for any but the most stout and difficult-to-shock reader. I tried - I really tried and all I could think to compare it to was Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal". 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. Maybe not to this full extent but the thought that anyone would have to experience any part of these horrors that the main character has to endure is ghastly and unimaginable.

I couldn't really recommend this to anyone, but if you're an inveterate reader with a stomach of steel and a mind of wide open space, then, if nothing else, this book will be unlike anything you have ever read before. 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. Or where I had to simply absorb what I had read before I tried feeding my brain more images and more pain.Another way to put this would be to say that COWS makes a rum mixture of a large number of important provocations: morality, ethics, sexuality, perversity, nihilism, sadism… nearly every concept I have mentioned in this review, including beauty and harmony, is contested. The cow, part of a herd that has escaped the slaughter house and now lives in tunnels under the city streets, along with a herd of other cows, wants to convince Steven to help them stop Cripps by killing him.

COWS’ has become a cult classic, much in the way ‘A Serbian Tale’ has for the movie watching community. Once he is the one committing the atrocities instead of having them done to him, the gruesome scenes acquire a new timbre; they are stepping stones no more, but milestones in his evolution. A cow revolution is in the low bellowing and Steven, soon becomes the cow-back riding ringleader in a power struggle between cows and humans. There is an apathy and numbness in even the most privileged of us that drives us to further instant dopamine hits from our social media and from our fentanyl-laced heroin.This kind of problem has been well studied in the case of de Sade, where repetition plays a central part in the creation of the pornographic effect. A couple of ideas I found interesting: what both Cripps and his acolyte Steven are lacking entirely is remorse. Artists who have tried such experiments have sometimes found they need to work hard to aestheticize the difficult images: Andres Serrano’s beautiful, nearly abstract morgue photographs are an example, and so are some of Joel-Peter Witkin’s elaborately staged, faux-antique photographs of people with various medical conditions. It wasn't my stomach forcing that either, I read the infamous "lunch scene" while literally eating lunch lol, but it was my brain! Whomever came up with the expression “Sticks and Stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me” should just ought rethink that statement after reading this book which smashes all boundaries of good taste, and just may make you become a vegetarian.