Cows

Cows emerges from the convergence of two related literary traditions: the visceral horror of 1980s splatterpunk and the transgressive fiction that gained prominence during the 1990s. Splatterpunk developed in the mid-1980s as a rebellious movement within horror fiction, with its name coined by writer David J. Schow at the 1986 World Fantasy Convention. Rejecting the restraint and suggestion associated with more traditional horror, its writers placed violence, bodily destruction, sexuality, and other taboo material directly before the reader. Authors associated with its development—including Clive Barker, John Skipp and Craig Spector, Joe R. Lansdale, and Schow—shared an interest in breaking both bodily and literary boundaries. The “punk” in splatterpunk emphasizes how graphic excess functioned partly as an anti-establishment aesthetic, deliberately violating assumptions about what respectable horror fiction should depict.

The movement also emerged during the political and economic transformations of the 1980s. In Britain, Margaret Thatcher’s governments emphasized privatization, deregulation, restrictions on organized labor, reductions in parts of the welfare state, and an increasingly individualistic conception of economic success. Similarly, these neoliberal policies also developed under Ronald Reagan in the United States. British horror consequently developed alongside deindustrialization, labor conflict, unemployment in former industrial communities, and widening debates about consumerism and individual responsibility. Critics have read the damaged, penetrated, and transformed bodies of 1980s extreme horror as responses to this environment: abstract forms of economic and social violence become brutally physical. Clive Barker’s Books of Blood (1984-1985), for example, emerged from Thatcher-era Britain with stories in which bodies, cities, workplaces, and marginalized populations repeatedly collide. Splatterpunk’s emphasis on violated flesh can be understand as one way horror made social alienation materially visible. 

By the 1990s, similar impulses appeared within the broader category of transgressive fiction, a term popularized by critic Michael Silverblatt in 1993 for writing organized around the violation of social, sexual, moral, and bodily boundaries. The mode had much older predecessors—including the Marquis de Sade, George Bataille, and William S. Burroughs—but the 1990s produced a particularly visible cluster of novels about alienated individuals responding destructively to consumer culture and conventional definitions of success. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991) juxtaposes extreme violence with Wall Street consumerism; Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) follows addiction and social marginalization in post-industrial Edinburgh; and Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) turns masculine dissatisfaction with corporate and consumer life into organized violence. Independent publishers and counterculture presses provided important outlets for fiction operating outside mainstream expectations.

Cows stands at the intersection of these traditions. Its extreme bodily horror places it alongside splatterpunk and extreme horror, while Steven’s alienation and attempts to escape conventional social constraints align it with 1990s transgressive fiction. At the same time, its economic imagery, as Steven works miserable days in a slaughterhouse then turns to stealing money with the herd, is rooted in its British origins in the post-Thatcher era. Steven works at the bottom of an industrial hierarchy where people become standardized products and dreams of consumer goods and domestic prosperity are learned from television, while he repeatedly interprets his inability to achieve that life as a personal failure. The slaughterhouse, the television fantasy of upward mobility, and Steven’s increasingly individualistic pursuit of power bring together concerns that had circulated through Britain counterculture through the 1980s and 1990s. Read within this context, the novel’s obscenity and violation of taboos grotesquely exaggerates a world in which bodies are commodities and liberation is imagined as an individual struggle for power rather than a collective escape from the conditions producing that alienation and poverty.