One of the most outrageous, original and insightful books ever written on the subject of alienation and societal decay, COWS is a violent, blood-soaked nightmare - a tale of love, self-empowerment and talking cows. Hailed around the world as a cult classic, Matthew Stokoe's novel set the bar for gritty urban horror."If you enjoy the sensation of your jaw dropping to the floor in a combination of stupefaction, hilarity, and shock, Cows is your book. Matthew Stokoe has written a novel like no other I've ever read--appalling, funny, and possessed of a sense of outre violence that makes Joris-Karl Huysmans read like Louisa May Alcott."--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. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written."--Kerrang!"Do you like cows? Do you have even a tinge of faith in the goodness of man? 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. ... 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. Stokoe is an able craftsman, which makes the content all the more horrifying as he blasts through boundaries and finds increasingly twisted ways of making readers squirm."--Publishers Weekly Matthew Stokoe is a novelist whose work has been translated into French, Spanish, Russian and German. In 2014 he was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière - France's most prestigious award for crime and mystery writing. He lives with his wife in Sydney, Australia.