Cows

Steven’s act of raping the roan and his subsequent distribution of human flesh to the herd mark the apex of his perceived power, fusing sexual dominance with messianic leadership. The act of bestiality is described as a “vicious cadence of dominance and submission” (179), establishing a hierarchy in which Steven asserts total control. This domination quickly expands when he presents the cows with his “final gift” of human meat. By telling them, “I am not teaching you to destroy men, but to become like them” (181), Steven articulates his core philosophy: that to be powerful, and thus to be truly human, is to be a predator. This ritualized cannibalism completes what he sees as their “mutation” from passive victims to active hunters, securing their dependence on him. In this moment, Steven’s apparent success demonstrates the corruption at the heart of Cruelty and Violence as Futile Attempts Toward Agency. He has created a kingdom in his own image, but the authority through which he defines himself is founded on the very same domination and brutality that once defined his own subjugation.

While Steven constructs his violent utopia underground, Lucy’s gruesome self-surgery in their home above completely dismantles his domestic one. Her conviction that she carries a “hard black stone of poison” (183) is a visceral rejection of the domestic fantasy Steven has projected onto their life. Where he envisions a perfect family and a comforting home, she experiences a fatal internal corruption that she believes must be violently excised. Her final act is the catastrophic culmination of the logic she has followed throughout the novel: If psychological suffering occupies a physical location, then purification can supposedly be achieved by cutting it out. Her dying feeling of being “clean” after removing the fetus shows how completely she has committed herself to this belief, even as the attempt destroys her. This act definitively shatters The Illusion of the American Dream. Steven’s fantasy required her to fulfill the role of wife and mother within a life whose appearance he had predetermined, but her suffering cannot be contained within that role. Additionally, she had tried to resist Steven’s fantasy throughout the novel, warning him that their false domesticity was not enough and that they would never truly be happy. However, through his own need for control, misogyny, and desperation, he forced an idealized family he learned from television onto their lives, ignoring the things like personal connection, love, and hard work that can truly build a stable life. His ideal ultimately collapses when confronted with the psychological reality of the person he expected to complete it.

Steven’s discovery of Lucy’s body triggers a psychological and environmental collapse, externalizing his internal desolation. His act of displaying the fetus, now “a badge that screamed, Idiot, sucker, deaf dumb and blind motherfucker” (188), turns his grief into self-loathing rage. This internal implosion is mirrored by the external world. The symbol of television, the original source of his aspirations, becomes a “liar” that he can no longer face. His regression into a catatonic state, allowing his own filth and Lucy’s decomposing body to contaminate his sanctuary, shows a complete surrender to entropy. The relentless rain that causes the apartment wall to collapse is a metaphor for his dissolving reality, physically stripping away his refuge and exposing his private horror to the world. The destruction of the flat finalizes the failure of his domestic project, leaving him with no buffer against a society he experiences as a source of terror.

Stripped of his home and his dream, Steven’s final retreat into the underground tunnels constitutes his attempt to abandon the human world altogether. His frantic flight from the city is driven by an overwhelming terror of human contact, a social anxiety so deep that he feels himself physically “disintegrating like meat in a bath of acid” (197). For Steven, society is a corrosive force that threatens to dissolve his very being. The underground tunnels become his only viable reality, a space of regression and rebirth into something non-human. This journey through the sewers and drains is a metaphorical baptism, washing away the failed identity of his surface life. This psychological shift becomes explicit when he rewrites his own history, convincing himself that “All there had ever been were these tunnels and the herd at the end of them” (200). He actively erases the trauma and failure associated with his human aspirations to fully embrace a subterranean, bestial existence as a means of survival.

The novel’s climax in the cavern solidifies Steven’s terrifying self-actualization. His final confrontation with the Guernsey, whom he brutally kills with Cripps’s thigh bone, brings the novel’s cycles of domination together in a single image: Steven uses the physical remains of the mentor who taught him violence to eliminate the final challenger to his own authority. The murder installs him as the undisputed leader of a hierarchy created by creatures who originally fled another system of domination. In this new role, Steven believes he can finally construct a perfect world “free of comparison with the outside” (206), where the herd can provide the permanent family and belong he has pursued throughout the novel. This horrifying apotheosis is the logical endpoint for a transgressive protagonist in the splatterpunk tradition. Having failed to achieve agency or belonging within human society, Steven finds it by abandoning his humanity entirely, creating a new reality founded on the very principles of violence and domination that destroyed his life on the surface.