There's a serious irony in the fact that my eldest granddaughter gave me this book for Christmas, from the gift registry I set up for family to chip away at the Books of Horror Go To List, because it's surely the least likely book there that she would finish. After all, she skips the sexy elevator scenes in Gini Koch's 'Aliens' books. I have a feeling she wouldn't do well with the sex scene here featuring half a dozen slaughtermen, a bevy of conveniently shaped wounds on a restrained cow and a cattle prod. There aren't many bodily fluids that it doesn't work through in a mere two pages.
As you might imagine from that suggestion, this book has built a substantial reputation for being so far beyond the pale that Matthew Stokoe could fairly retitle it DNF to comply with advertising standards. In fact, not only do plenty of brave readers not finish it, they point out loudly that, after not finishing it, they then threw it away, as if it's a public mark of shame that they can't bear, a sort of modern equivalent of the red A on Hester Prynne's chest. However, it abides, like it's a sexually transmitted disease of a book.
Frankly, it isn't the breaking of taboos that affected me here, even though that's almost continual. It's the fact that the characters are so desensitised to it that every instance is related as matter of fact, almost not worthy of mention. It's so overt from the very outset that I couldn't see a way not to read this as a commentary on our modern society and culture, even if it never focuses on any of the many potential targets. It's never about deviant porn or reality TV or toddler beauty pageants or junk food or school shootings or serial killer worship or *insert your favourite obscenity here*. It lets us fill in that blank, because it's about all of them at once, the overwhelming total of it.
Initially, we might think it's about fast food, especially if we've read Graham Masterton's 'Eric the Pie' or other takes on the subject. Our protagonist is Steven and he lives at home with his mother, who he calls the Hagbeast, a grossly obese crudity on legs who constantly serves up slabs of meat that she's undercooked for him. The first page involves him feeling the damage this is doing to his body in biological terms. He doesn't believe anyone else, out there in the decent world, has to go through anything like this. He's different.
That only escalates in chapter two, because Stokoe ramps up everything. It looks worse, it smells worse and he peppers the text with matter-of-fact cruelties like how the Hagbeast had crippled his dog, named Dog, with a brick years earlier for no reason at all. We have to wonder at this point if the reason that Steven is different is because he sees the world this way but maybe it's not really. After all, nobody could be as outrageously awful as the Hagbeast. That feeling builds as the book runs on because, while everything at this point could be real in our world where people like Josef Fritzl actually exist, we soon end up watching things happen that can't outside fantasy land.
Maybe that's why everything is so matter-of-fact, especially for Steven. Other people are capable and willing to show emotion. The Hagbeast screams at him when he finally refuses to eat what his supposedly loving mother slops onto his plate, even though she eats the same thing that he does. When he gets a job at a meat grinding plant, Cripps, his foreman, simply aches to teach him about the ecstasy and self-empowerment that he associates with killing cattle in the production line. He almost feels like a self-help guru, lost in what he's selling. Steven just lets it happen, just like he's always let everything happen.
Before long, Stokoe brings his metaphors to literal life. When Steven finally decides that he won't take his mother's slop any more, he takes control and "cooks" for them both, "cooks" meaning he takes a dump on a couple of plates and serves them up. Sure, he has to eat it too, but he's making his mother literally eat shit just like he believes he's metaphorically been doing for years. Over at the meat grinding plant, Cripps gets so carried away in a particular moment that he slips Steven's trousers down and rapes him right there on the production line. Steven just takes it, even though we already know he's straight, because that's what good employees do if the boss shafts them.
Inevitably, any story like this that embraces taboo breaking as an Olympic sport, is going to get to death and it surely does in a number of plot strands. Steven believes that the Hagbeast is trying to kill him, so he decides to return the favour, careful to avoid any way in which he might be caught. A talking Guernsey persuades him to join his herd in extracting revenge on Cripps. And, Lucy, a kinda-sorta girlfriend for Steven who lives upstairs from him, is so obsessed with ridding her body of the toxins she believes are adding up in there that she watches vivisection videos as how-to manuals to locate the offending matter within herself, is far too fundamentally broken to survive for long.
I'd love to talk about this book in a book club, but I don't dare suggest to any of the ones I'm aware of. It's as impactful as I expected it would be, with so many people rejecting it quickly and totally, but in different ways to how I expected. I'm fascinated by how other readers take it, what they see the point as being. Clearly there is one because so many of the metaphors are transparent, but I was never able to decide how much of this was real, whether it's just the world seen through eyes that have never experienced love or nurture and whether his interpretations are remotely valid or not. There are so many ways to take it that this review could be as long as the book in listing them.
Which I won't do to you. I can't say that I enjoyed this, but I was fascinated by it. I never felt a need to put it aside; I wanted to learn more so I could figure out the enigma of what it all meant. Sure, I can't recommend it to almost anyone I know because, after a few chapters in, they'd refuse to talk to me ever again. However, the extreme horror folks who get off on gratuitousness might not get this because it's so relentlessly matter-of-fact. It's that rare book that survives not because it has an audience to milk but because so many people accept the challenge of seeing if that audience is them. Which it very rarely is.
A few years ago, I asked Dan Haggerty about an early film of his called 'The Pink Angels', that I had covered in my first book, about bad American films and why they were made. I felt that it had to be offensive to each of the demographics that it would logically have been made for, so I asked him, a cast member, who he thought the audience for the film truly was. He thought about it for a while, then looked at me and said, "Well, I guess you are." I'd suggest that that holds true for this book. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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