COWS

Name: COWS
Author: Matthew Stokoe
ISBN: 978-1-936070-70-1

by Matthew Stokoe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2011

Transgressive fiction that begs to offend, and succeeds. Talking cows and startling wordplay can’t redeem a novel whose only...

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A dysfunctional 20-something soothes his uneasy soul with sex, blood and violence.

Underground literary shock-rocker Stokoe (Empty Mile, 2010, etc.) slaps his readers in the face with this bloody, truly disgusting diatribe against normalcy. On the bright side, there’s absolutely no pretense about what the book is aiming for, even from the opening lines. “In bed,” he writes. “Steven could feel the toxins tumbling slowly through his bloodstream, jagged black particles that rolled in a slow-motion undersea current, gouging soft tissue with their passing.” Stokoe’s muse is an immature, deeply disturbed young man with the scars of someone five times his age. His only true companion is Dog, a paraplegic mutt. His eternal nemesis is his mother, called only the Hagbeast, a swollen, caustic tormentor who ceaselessly berates her child for his disgusting habits, though hers are no better. It’s a far cry from the '50s television shows by which he measures happiness, and her abhorrent behavior inspires him to murderous thoughts. His new job gives him an outlet, of sorts. Steven takes a job working in a slaughterhouse, where a menacing overseer named Cripps wants to bring his new charge into the sacred work of cow-killing. “This is where things are real,” Cripps advises. Then there’s his new upstairs neighbor Lucy. Convinced that all of the world’s poisons are contained in foul black lumps hidden among the organs, she endlessly prods him to sift through the viscera at work for proof of her theory. Revolted yet? If not, the colonoscopy married to the couple’s sex scene should be plenty to push even jaundiced readers right over the edge.

Transgressive fiction that begs to offend, and succeeds. Talking cows and startling wordplay can’t redeem a novel whose only goal is to hit bottom.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2011

ISBN: 978-1-936070-70-1

Page Count: 190

Publisher: Akashic

Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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SUMMER ISLAND

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2001

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...

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Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.

Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.

The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.

Pub Date: March 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-609-60737-5

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

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LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

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This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.