Cows
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Chapters 9-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, sexual violence, rape, physical abuse, emotional abuse, animal cruelty, animal death, sexual content, and cursing.
Chapter 9 Summary
During dinner, Steven realizes his mother has put an excessive amount of salt in his food. She tells a disturbing story about her youth working on a goose farm. Steven, who has heard her stories before, is unaffected by the words. They argue, and she asserts that he has to respect her, as she has made him what he is. A brief childhood memory of his own powerlessness flashes through Steven’s mind before he insults his mother and vomits on the table. The Hagbeast laughs, walks over to Dog, and urinates on the whimpering animal. Steven ends the night toweling Dog dry in his bedroom by the light of the TV.
Chapter 10 Summary
Steven goes to the fourth floor to visit his neighbor, Lucy. He recalls his childhood escapes to the building’s roof, where he would dream of a better life inspired by the city lights. He now hopes Lucy can be the key to achieving an approximation of the ideal life he sees on television.
Lucy lets him into her messy apartment, where a video of a surgical operation is playing. She is obsessed with finding an accumulated internal poison—emotional misery she believes drops from the mind into the gut and builds up there—that she believes is the source of human suffering. She is angry that Steven failed to check inside the intestines of the cows at his job for this substance, since they could have contained it.
Lucy then asks him to help her use an endoscope—a probe used to view inside the body—to search for the substance in her own colon. As Steven guides the probe into her anus, they watch the video feed on a monitor. Lucy repeatedly notes how unclean she is, then the probe becomes blocked. Aroused, Steven has sex with her from behind, and she responds by scolding him for moving the probe. She remains completely focused on the monitor throughout. After, he removes the probe, and she cleans and smells the fecal matter on it.
Chapter 11 Summary
After they have sex, Lucy immediately falls asleep without speaking to Steven. Disappointed that his life has not magically changed, Steven returns to his room. He decides that Lucy, in her desperation, will eventually be forced to depend on him and call it love, fitting into his “plagiarized blueprint for living” (47)—an idealized model of life taken from television shows. He quickly realizes, however, that the Hagbeast will discover and destroy any relationship he forms. Concluding that he must murder his mother to protect his future with Lucy, Steven feels little horror at the prospect, reasoning that she was never a real mother to him. Worried that he lacks the courage for a direct physical confrontation, he resolves to find an indirect method, such as poison, to “strain” her body until it dies. He lies awake all night unable to sleep, contemplating and watching reflections of streetlights on the ceiling.
Chapter 12 Summary
The next morning, the Hagbeast confronts Steven about being out the previous night; he says he was on the roof. During the ensuing argument, Steven accuses her of poisoning his food and declares that from now on, he will be responsible for preparing all their meals. Enraged, she roars at him, and Steven responds by hitting her in the head. The Hagbeast shows no pain, only a cold calculation as she reassesses the power dynamic between them. To preserve his small victory, Steven again insists that he will make their food from now on, then leaves the flat. As he departs, she screams after him, accepting his challenge and vowing that she can eat anything he can make.
Chapter 13 Summary
At the meat plant, Steven watches Cripps efficiently kill a loose cow with a shotgun. Impressed by this sureness of purpose, Steven wonders if he can attain such clarity for his own plan. Cripps soon approaches him and leads him to the slaughter room, promising that the act of killing is the key to personal strength.
Cripps forces Steven to touch a live cow as a slaughterman kills it with a boltgun—a device that drives a metal bolt into an animal’s skull. He then has Steven hold the boltgun to kill another cow himself. As Steven pulls the trigger, Cripps, who has been penetrating him from behind throughout, ejaculates inside him simultaneously.
Afterward, a traumatized Steven is led to an observation platform, where he watches the other slaughtermen cut holes into a living cow and insert their penises into the wounds. Gummy electrocutes the cow with a cattle prod, causing it to defecate all over himself while he vomits. The men ejaculate into the dying cow’s wounds as one of them kills it with a boltgun. Steven then closes his eyes.
Chapter 14 Summary
That night at home, Steven is in a daze. He tries to complete tasks around the kitchen to distract himself, but his mind keeps returning to killing and “heavier, following torture” (63) he witnessed at the slaughterhouse. He decides that he needs to begin planning to kill his mother. He first considers household chemicals—bleach, drain cleaner—before a sudden boldness leads him to abandon subtlety entirely. He serves both himself and the Hagbeast a meal of feces.
At dinner, the Hagbeast accepts the challenge. Steven forces himself to eat, a revolting process he barely endures without vomiting. The Hagbeast retches and vomits onto her plate but recovers and continues eating her portion mechanically. After they both finish, the Hagbeast smashes her plate and forces a naked Steven to stand before her. She notes how thin and frail he is, then strips naked as well, displaying her body as the ultimate symbol of a strength he can never defeat. Steven is sick all night but, the next morning, he sees the Hagbeast’s vomit on the floor and interprets it as a sign of hope.
Chapter 15 Summary
Steven visits Lucy and finds her dissecting a live rat, still searching for the poison she believes exists inside living bodies. After seeing her desperation and a pile of previously dissected rats, he holds her, and they have sex. The wall is covered with photographs of human bodies mid-dissection. After, he tells Lucy he killed a cow and about Cripps’s claims of how it will change him, but she is dismissive, insisting it’s not that simple. Steven reflects that the killing did not grant him the strength Cripps promised, and he feels only revulsion. Back downstairs, he finds his anus is sore from the rape by Cripps. The Hagbeast isn’t up, and Steven turns circles in the strange freedom of the kitchen before leaving for the plant.
Chapters 9-15 Analysis
After a detached sexual encounter with Lucy, Steven returns to his room and decides he must murder his mother, a choice that shifts him from passive endurance to active, horrifying rebellion. His motivation is to protect his “plagiarized blueprint for living” (47), an idealized domesticity sourced from television that he now projects onto Lucy. This reveals how The Illusion of the American Dream, in its most distorted and desperate form, begins to fuel his transgressive turn toward matricide. Steven does not yet possess the family he images; instead, he treats Lucy as the “raw materials” from which that future can be constructed, reducing another person to a component within his predetermined fantasy. He rationalizes killing the Hagbeast by reasoning that she was never a mother in the sentimentalized way he has seen on television, so her life is forfeit in his pursuit of that fantasy. His contemplation of murder, in his mind, is a calculated, logical step toward achieving his dream life. The disturbing logic shows how Steven’s character has changed, as instead of merely longing for the happiness TV has taught him to desire, he begins deciding which obstacles can be eliminated to “force” that happiness into existence. The language of construction and raw materials also echoes the slaughterhouse, as Steven approaches his imagined family with the same instrumental logic that reduces living beings to usable components.
Steven’s hope for a new life is immediately complicated by his interactions with Lucy, whose own obsessions create a grotesque parody of the intimacy he seeks. When she enlists his help to guide an endoscope into her colon, their connection is defined by a shared, clinical fascination with internal decay. Her desire to locate and surgically excise this internal corruption mirrors Steven’s plan to violently murder his mother, which he sees as the external source of his trauma. The scene where they have sex while she stares intently at the video feed of her own intestines highlights their alienation; physical proximity does not produce emotional intimacy because Lucy’s attention remains directed inward, toward the hidden source of suffering she believes exists there. Technology becomes an intermediary even at the moment Steven interprets as the beginning of the relationship he desires. Ironically, the thing which could provide them both with a source of comfort, healing, and escape—physical and personal connection—is instead ignored by both. Instead, they each see it as an opportunity to physically remove or begin to construct a happy life. The grotesque, unsettling diction of this scene underscores this idea, as even their physical intimacy is corrupted by their trauma and warped views of the world.
The visit to the slaughterhouse provides Steven with the first direct test of the alternative pathway to empowerment promised by Cripps. The foreman presents the act of killing as a mystical key to unlocking personal strength, promising that the slaughter room “gives up its secrets to any man with the cock to ask” (56). His language combines violence, masculinity, and spiritual revelation, as the slaughterhouse becomes a ritual space of masculine self-creation. However, the experience does not ennoble Steven; it violates and traumatizes him. As he is forced to kill a cow, he is simultaneously raped by Cripps, making Steven simultaneously the perpetrator of violence and the victim of another person’s domination. The juxtaposition destabilizes any simple distinction between those with power and those without, instead presenting the cyclical violence as endless. Steven can take the cow’s life while remaining unable to control what happens to his own body—the exact opposite of the thing he sought through Cripps’s guidance. The subsequent spectacle of the other slaughtermen collectively raping and torturing a living cow reveals the “strength” Cripps champions as a degraded, sadistic form of dominance rather than genuine liberation. For Steven, there is no epiphany, only a “sickening backward flip of approaching fugue” (60). The scene therefore provides an early contradiction within the theme of Cruelty and Violence as Futile Attempts Toward Agency. Cripps claims killing will make Steven more fully himself, but Steven’s first experience of it produces dissociation—a psychological movement away from himself. The supposed ritual of self-realization instead results in an even more extreme loss of control.
Steven’s first direct act of rebellion against the Hagbeast escalates their conflict to a new level of visceral horror and further develops the theme of Cruelty and Violence as Futile Attempts Toward Agency. By serving a meal of feces, he weaponizes the excrement that has dominated his life as their domestic space becomes a battlefield of contamination, humiliation, and control. Steven essentially reverses the structure that has defined their relationship: after years of believing his mother’s food is poisoning and degrading him, he now attempts to force her to consume the filth produced by his own body. This reversal makes the confrontation less an escape from the Hagbeast’s methods than an imitation of them. Steven tries to gain power by mastering the same logic of forced consumption and degradation through which she has controlled him. The dinner then becomes a contest of physical and psychological endurance, a test of who can withstand the greater defilement. Ultimately, Steven’s reaction that he “felt good when he saw” his mother’s vomit as a sign of victory (70) shows that the confrontation has shown him that escalation, more degradation, and more violence are the answer to his unhappiness.
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