Matthew Stokoe, Cows, Creation Books, 1999.
"Do you like cows? Do you have even a tinge of faith in the goodness of man? If so, skip this relentlessly violent survey of some taboos you've heard of, and hopefully, a few new ones that would never occur to you. The novel follows 25-year-old Steven, who dwells in a faceless American city with his sadistic mother ("the Hagbeast"), his only friend a crippled dog named Dog. His life takes a dramatic turn when he takes a slaughterhouse job and is quickly initiated into the factory's bloody and darkly sexual brotherhood. Then he meets upstairs neighbor Lucy, who is obsessed with vivisection, and starts to believe there may be a ray of light in his otherwise nightmarish life, but what follows is a phantasmagoria of extreme violence, death, sex, bestiality, self-surgery, torture, and a really, really, really bad mother-son relationship, all of which takes what the marquis de Sade did and pushes it down the road a little farther. Stokoe is an able craftsman, which makes the content all the more horrifying as he blasts through boundaries and finds increasingly twisted ways of making readers squirm." - Publishers Weekly
"BSE was never this mad. A stomach-churning read...a 'Wasp Factory' for the '90's." - D.Tour
"Forget Bret Easton Ellis, Poppy Z Brite, and Dennis Cooper. That's kid's stuff. If you want something truly repellent, try this." - Gay Times
"Stokoe's vision of Hell is a carnivore's nightmare. A powerful and all-too possibly prophetic work." - Kathy Acker
The word is out that Cows is every bit as dark and deranged as Iain Bank's classic 'The Wasp Factory'. It's not: it's even more so. Possibly the most visceral novel ever written. - Kerrang!
"Matthew Stokoe’s first novel, Cows, is by far the most brutal, imaginative and fucking exciting book I have ever read. The now-infamous cult classic is a visceral, deranged portrayal of violence, abuse, and ultimately doomed love, in which each scene plays out like a nightmarish Paul McCarthy performance piece orchestrated by The Swans. The protagonist, Steven, strives to mimic a life borrowed from sitcom families, despite his bleak daily realities. His home life involves a paraplegic dog, a mother who feeds him shit (literally), and a girlfriend obsessed with dissecting out a black toxin she believes to be envenoming her. Steven’s professional life in the slaughterhouse is equally dark as he finds himself talking to a cow hidden in the ventilation system. Without revealing too much, I’ll venture that the hype around a bullshit movie like Human Centipede is trumped by the first chapter of Cows." - Paul K at Street Carnage
"This is a book about the need to belong. This is a book about the disparity between the images we see on TV and the reality of the world around us. This is a book about Steven and his search for the life that he sees on TV and from which he is excluded. This is a book that is violent, perverse, obscene, relentlessly repellent and extremely imaginative. It veers from miserablist realism to comic-book outrage to dark fantasy and back again, and in doing so it transcends shock-value to present something far more interesting.
To précis the story would do it no justice, and I’ll avoid focusing on the violent and scatological scenes with which most reviews seem to be fixated. At times it’s heavy going, but to be honest a lot of it is so over the top that it fails to make the impact that a more realistic book would have. It also gives the phrase ‘beef on the bone’ a whole new meaning.
The book’s been compared to the ‘Wasp Factory’ more than once, and I can see why, though I think Iain Banks’s book is the stronger of the two. However, this book reveals an altogether different imagination, one that deserves recognition for its weirdness more than for its ability to repel and repulse.
Matthew Stokoe proves that he’s a sick fuck, but he’s a sick fuck worth reading." - Black Star Review
"At the age of twenty-five, I thought I had real problems. I’d just started a new second job and was still mastering the art of living paycheck to paycheck. I was driving a Buick almost as old as I was, for which, I think, I paid one hundred dollars to drive. Although, let’s be honest, the gas mileage was something to behold, and as gas prices leap back toward the four dollar mark again, it sure would beat the v-eight monster that I drive now. At least what I have now has a CD player that takes a few weeks before it absolutely destroys whatever album I spin endlessly to and from work, picking out only my favorite songs to take crater-like gouges from the disk.
Steven has real problems. Getting held over at work yet another night meant that I missed a favorite television show, it was enough to ruin the day. When Steven gets held over from work, people die. And I wish I could tell you that dying in the world of Cows was just as simple as that, but no. No one just keels over and ceases to be in Cows. No one just uses the bathroom, cleans up, and goes about their day in Cows. No one eats regular food, wipes their mouth, and reads the newspaper in Cows. No one, and I mean, no one exists in Cows without something spectacularly horrendous happening to them.
This book has everything you could ever want out of a bad acid trip from Quentin Tarantino and Charlie Kaufman’s love child, all of the vomit and bodily fluids, exploding bodies, rotting corpses, sodomy, home-endoscopies, beastiality, and of course profanity. A lot of profanity. A lot. But what else would you expect when the main character just wants to model his life after what he sees in the sitcoms on television? Hanging out with and trying to rule a clan of sewer dwelling talking cows was featured on an episode of The Cosby Show, right?
Normally, when someone’s writing is so focused on shocking its reader, it is meant to cover a lack of depth and talent. Stokoe commands scenes of utter horror so grandiose that you may even have to put the book down for a few minutes to compose yourself. However, he whispers his words into your ear with the voice of an angel drinking herbal tea laced with honey and promises of love and wealth. The poetry in his words is Stokoe’s secret weapon, driving you further into his world of isolation and despair. If you’re looking for a book that makes Last Days look like The Giving Tree, then Cows and then perhaps a sanitarium are right up your alley." - Sean P. Ferguson
"Matthew Stokoe’s Cows is a roller-coaster ride through the dark heart of the American dream… A cataract of filth gushes forth from every page of Matthew Stokoe’s brilliant novel, Cows…. Matthew Stokoe's grim atmospherics and affectless narrative call to mind Iain Banks' 1980s Goth classic The Wasp Factory… Stokoe's novel is a militant vegan manifesto… a prescient look into our own future as carnivores…
None of these things are true. Or rather, all of them are true. They're just stupid. I found Stokoe's book (Cows) hilarious, and deftly written, and moving, and yes, from time to time, I guess shocking. But I'd be very surprised to learn that Stokoe's purpose in writing Cows was to shock or provoke. Pry as I might, I could not find under the floorboards of this slender novel a didactic intent, for which I am thankful. I did find an unusually well-tuned ear for language, and a sure-handed sense of the lengths to which language can be pushed in the service of a singular vision. I found, in sum, a writer. A very good one. While any particular detail in Cows may seem offensive or shocking (and I should probably mention that those readers who are easily upset should STAY THE FUCK AWAY from this book because otherwise you will be puking all over your lace doilies), the cumulative effect of these details is neither cathartic nor stunning nor disgusting nor any of many words that I could easily call to mind to describe this novel. The cumulative effect, for me, at least, is recognition. I recognize Matthew Stokoe's writing: as inevitable; as necessary; as vital as blood.
By portraying cruelty in such loving detail that the reader (you, me, and that kid in the tree) cannot help but admire his style, even if you recoil from his content, Matthew Stokoe has performed a magic trick known in the novelist's trade as "writing."
That trick never gets old." - James Greer
"Whooo Hoooo! This has got to be the most intense book I have ever read. I know I say that with the regularity of a chiming clock, but "Cows" by Matthew Stokoe really takes the cake. Creation Books apparently prints some other extreme titles, probably ones that may be even more visceral than this one, but Stokoe's devastating portrait of a man's need to belong is simply unforgettable. The author has another novel out, called "High Life," that promises to be as unsettling as this story. It may be some time before I muster the necessary fortitude to read that one, though. Yes, "Cows" is that disturbing. There is a warning label on the back cover of the book, if that tells you anything.
"Boy meets Cow," trumpets the back cover, but that is only part of the story. "Cows" relates the pathetic story of Steven, a down on his luck, alienated man living in a disheveled tenement building in England. Steve lives with his dear old mum, a woman so repulsive in appearance and manner that her son refers to her as the "Hagbeast." Our protagonist despises this woman to such an extreme, with a mutual feeling on the part of his mother, that he spends his days and nights in bed with Dog (his crippled pet dog) plotting how to break free from her controlling influences. He is even convinced that his mother is trying to kill him through the obnoxious meals she forces him to eat everyday. There isn't much chance of this momma's boy shedding his chains, as he consistently caves in under his sick whims. The only options for eventual freedom arrives in the form of his new job at the packinghouse and through a potential love affair with Lucy, a girl who lives upstairs.
Problems with these hopes quickly emerge. Lucy is, well, completely insane. She spends her days obsessing about the poisons building up inside every human being. By watching videos of operations and through painful self-examinations, Lucy hopes to discover the location of these internal toxins in order to remove them from her own body. Steven recognizes Lucy's illnesses but fervently hopes that he can create a world where the two will live together, have a child, and mirror the perfect family world he sees on his television set every night. In the meantime, Steve will have to deal with his mother and work at the packinghouse so he can earn money to actualize his visions.
Then there is the job at the slaughterhouse. Steven quickly falls in with Cripps, the head supervisor in the room where they actually kill the cattle. This aberrant human being recognizes Steven's lack of character and starts to indoctrinate him with philosophies about how killing animals imbues men with power in all the other avenues of their lives. Adding to the general madness is the discovery by Steven of a rogue herd of talking cows living underneath the city. These cows escaped from the oily clutches of Cripps and his fellow thugs and are now seeking revenge against the evil men working on the killing floor. Which path will Steven choose? Will he accept Cripps's nauseating, fascistic visions or will he work with the talking cows and purge the world of an evil human being?
Turning a page in this book is like repeatedly dropping an anvil on your head. You are not certain of what you will find on the next page, but you soon discover that it will be so far over the top as to defy description. "Cows" encompasses nearly every anti-social behavior imaginable. There are scatological excesses galore, mind-blowing violence, weirdness on a metatectonic level, and stark examinations of power relationships. There is a message in "Cows," but the crushing amount of gore nearly buries it under a mountain of ground beef.
This is a story about dreams and how environment can crush those gossamer longings. Steven wants to live; he wishes he had a caring mother, a beautiful and loving wife, a nice house, a child, and all the amenities of modern life. He sees the images on television depicting a perfect life and thinks he can achieve these things in his own existence. His difficulties in connecting to society in no way lessen his desire to do so. Steven's internal condition is so fragile and fragmented that he is an easy target for the likes of Cripps, who promises self-realization and authenticity through violence if Steven will only take the plunge. One problem comes when Steven thinks he can save Lucy as well as himself. When his visions of perfection come apart at the seams, when one action towards living the dream requires greater and more violent actions to sustain them, Steven disintegrates and becomes something worse than even Cripps and everything is lost. It does not help that Steven's ideals are built on an illusion anyway, namely the vacuous world of television. He is doomed from the start without even realizing it.
This book does not have a happy, fairy-tale ending. It is rather a series of painful, tentative steps by a man who desperately needs something to live for. I commend Stokoe for weaving such a penetrating vision in a quickly read story. I do not, however, have warm feelings for the passages that almost made me bolt for the bathroom. I have an iron stomach, but "Cows" nearly did me in. Only the stoutest souls need crack the cover on this book." - Jeffrey Leach
"Matthew Stokoe’s Cows is a graphic novel. Not a novel told in illustrations, but a novel full of lurid, explicit, and highly unpleasant details. Cows is not for everyone, but for those who are interested in the darker side of human nature, Stokoe offers masterful prose, outrageous plotting, and some of the biggest gross-outs in literature.
Cows is a reissue of Stokoe’s first novel, long out of print, since his subsequent books Empty Mile and High Life have become internationally acclaimed. The book follows Steven, a scared and dysfunctional young man who lives with his highly abusive mother, who goes by the name the Hagbeast. The Hagbeast is a gargantuan unshowered monster who insists that Steven eat her cooking, which is usually rancid meat. She belittles him, threatens him, and paralyzes and urinates on his dog. There are many, many scenes early on of Steven telling his mother the food is garbage and her arguing back that there’s nothing wrong with it. At first, the reader begins to think that Steven might be the problem, not his mother. Could these horrific things really be happening?
Then Stokoe brings the readers to Steven’s new job at the beef slaughterhouse. He meets the foreman, Cripps, who introduces him to wonders of the slaughter line, and the subsequent “slaughter parties,” where the men on the slaughter line do some pretty horrible things. Cripps tells Steven, “Killing is an act of self-realization, it shows a man the truth of his power. And when you know this, boy, the pettiness they try to shackle us with falls away like shit.” With Cripps’s heavy-handed speech, readers will see what’s coming, but the extent of the violence and brutality is Stokoe’s to show. As Cripps promises, killing cows changes Steven, and Steven begins to concoct a plan on how to get back at the Hagbeast.
Stokoe brings some lyricism to the horror, using onomatopoeic verbs that echo each other, bringing to mind the loud din of the slaughterhouse:
On the line that morning a cow got loose, somehow slipped from a grabber before the slaughtermen put the bolt in its head, and came clattering into the process hall, half slipping on blood, scattering men, ramming the inverted dead bodies of its brothers. Looking for an escape from cow hell. But its terror must have made it blind and it ended by slamming its soft nose against a ventilation grille until Cripps came over and blew its brains out with a shotgun.
Most of the book’s descriptions are more graphic than this, but excerpting them out of context would deaden the intended effect.
While Steven is slaughtering, he’s forming a sweet relationship with the crazy girl upstairs, Lucy. Lucy is a vivisectionist who believes that there is literally a tiny piece of badness inside everything, and she’s determined to find it. Her first act of intimacy with Steven is when she asks him to assist her in giving herself a colonoscopy, looking for the evil.
As Steven’s life becomes more and more extreme, his time with Lucy begins to take on the color of a typical television couple. Lucy cleans and cooks dinner, gives up her gruesome hobbies, and even gets pregnant. The two spend their evenings watching sitcoms, trying to learn how regular people live. Steven never shares his life of carnage with Lucy, and he especially doesn’t tell her about the talking cows. The cows are living underground and have sworn to kill the slaughterhouse foreman. They recruit Steven to assist them.
Cows proves its main thesis: The madness inside all of us can drive us to blood lust. Steven has motivation to become violent towards some people, but there’s no reason to go as far as he does. Same with the men at the slaughter parties. Even one of the most peaceful creatures, the cow, can become crazed with violence under the right circumstances in Stokoe’s world.
The hysterical violence and black humor doesn’t mask Stokoe’s point. The only misstep is regarding Lucy: she is too interesting and too real. Unlike the Hagbeast, Steven, and Cripps, who are all cartoons and as such can be as disgusting as Stokoe wants to make them, Lucy has a great deal of sadness and vulnerability that isn’t masked by over-the-top humor. Also, several chapters are from her point of view, while all the others are from Steven’s, and it’s unclear why this was done.
It’s unlikely that most readers will notice any vulnerability from Lucy, as they will be caught up in the cartoon carnage of Cows. Stokoe’s visceral dystopia will cause readers both to reflect and to feel repulsed." - Marie Mundaca
"I'm not normally one to preface a review, or even mention in a review, when a book is not appropriate for certain audiences. (I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). But I'm going to start this one by saying, quite bluntly, Cows is not for everyone. In fact, Cows may not be for anyone. It is scatological, offensive, disgusting, filled to the brim with sex, violence, and sexual violence, and is probably capable of inciting nausea in those who are perfectly capable of sitting through atrocity footage and watch driving school videos for fun.
Cows is also visionary, brilliant, amazingly complex, a must on my ten best reads of the year list, and the second full-length piece of fiction I have finished in less than twenty-four hours this year. It's not only so nasty you can't look away, but it is supremely, blindingly great.
Matthew Stokoe's debut novel can best be summarized as follows. Take a healthy dollop of Horatio Alger (tempered with a dash of Alger Hiss), mix in a good dose of China Mieville's King Rat, a shot of Robert Bloch, add a couple of jiggers of Peter Sotos, ten drams of Camus, two shakes of David Mamet, bung in a couple of PETA ads of the most offensive variety, and then dump the whole mess into a shaker lined with Stewart Home. Shake, chill, and serve over ice cubes laced with LSD, rat poison, and Hideshi Hino films. One taste and you have scraped the tip of the iceberg that is Cows.
Steven, the protagonist, is not a happy person. His paraplegic dog, named Dog, was crippled years back by his mother, known affectionately throughout as the Hagbeast. He's twenty-five years old, and the only time he's left the flat is to run up to the roof and stare out over the city (presumably London) and imagine what life is like for normal people. After the roof got old, he started watching television obsessively, coming to believe that American sitcom families from the fifties led normal lives, and guaging happiness by those standards. As the novel opens, Steven is on his way to his first day of work, ever, at a slaughterhouse. He has a new upstairs neighbor named Lucy, who just moved in and after whom he lusts, a foreman named Cripps who takes maybe a bit too much of a fatherly interest in Steven, and something watching him from the ventilation system in the slaughterhouse.
As if that's not enough, Lucy is convinced that all the poisons in human beings (mucous, excrement, etc.) are to be found in large black lumps mixed in with the organs, and ceaselessly dissects things trying to find them; Steven is convinced the Hagbeast is trying to kill him by feeding him undercooked pork; the thing in the vents is getting more insistent; Cripps wants to teach Steven the ins and outs of cow-killing. Life, to say the least, is a mess for Steven, until everything falls into place at once and he begins to understand who he really is.
On the surface, Cows is an exceptionally offensive novel. It doesn't take too much analysis, though, to realize that the offense here is aimed with a deadly precision, and Stokoe weighed every word carefully in order to smack the reader into wakefulness throughout. Once you've understood that, unearthing the subtleties underneath becomes that much easier. Steven is a fantastically-drawn character whose emotions are never less than real (though as Guernsey tells him, there's nothing at all normal about Steven; that we can identify with him at all is a work of literary mastery). The rest of the characters are all caricatures of some sort (one is tempted to map them onto the seven deadly sins in a piece of textual analysis), but despite this are are very well presented and, with the exception of the Hagbeast (who is drawn as completely evil) empathetic; Cripps may be a power-hungry perverted moron, but there's enough of the father figure in him for us to see him, briefly, as Steven must after first meeting him, for example. The situations and the characters are all throughly blown out of proportion, but the grittiness with which Stokoe sets his scenes makes his dystopian vision as real to the reader as the backdrops of Ridley Scott's marvelous film Balderunner.
None of this is truly astounding; many of the same strengths can be found in much of Creation's output (these same strengths, for example, are what make Pantziarka's House of Pain so much more readable than Jeremy Reed or the erotic novels of Anne Rice, for example). Where Stokoe truly transcends is in the tenderness with which he treats Steven's odd love triangle, and the subtle power struggle between Steven and Guernsey through the latter half of the novel. Ultimately, whatever the message one takes away from the book (the late Kathy Acker, for excample, brandished it as a banner for the vegan movement), at its core are those relationships.
You will either love Cows or hate it. You will emerge from it disgusted, mystified, or both. But you will not read Cows and finish it unchanged. D>Tour magazine called Cows "the Wasp Factory of the nineties." Whether Stokoe will achieve the same status that Banks has is a long way from being seen, but it is impossible to deny that Cows is a deeply moving, very important novel that should not be missed. (...)" - Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal"
Matthew Stokoe, Empty Mile, Akashic Books, 2010.
"When Johnny Richardson comes home to the town of Oakridge he has one thing on his mind--putting right a terrible mistake he made eight years ago. Revisiting the past, though, is a dark and dangerous game in small town America. When a careless sexual episode leads to the suicide of the town's first lady, Johnny finds himself the target of a revenge campaign that threatens to tear apart the fragile world he's built with his brain-damaged brother and depressive girlfriend among the gold-bearing mountains of Northern California.
Left an unexplained piece of land when his father mysteriously disappears, Johnny must unravel its secrets in a desperate bid to protect those he loves. His efforts to do this, though, have deadly consequences and will ultimately force him to confront not only his own failings, but the very nature of guilt itself.
A searing meditation on the futility of trying to right the wrongs of the past, Empty Mile blends elements of thrilling urban noir with the wide open spaces of outdoor adventure in a story that reflects America's contemporary uncertainty about itself."
"From the outset of this heartbreakingly powerful contemporary noir, Stokoe (High Life) gets the reader deeply emotionally invested in his guilt-ridden narrator, Johnny Richardson. Eight years after leaving his hometown of Oakridge, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Johnny returns to face the consequences of a reckless youthful act. Instead of keeping an eye on his then 11-year-old brother, Stan, during an outing to a local lake, Johnny slipped off with his girlfriend, Marla, into the surrounding woods. Left alone, Stan, a smart kid but a poor swimmer, suffered brain damage after nearly drowning in the lake. In the present, Johnny and Marla reconnect, but a suicide prompted by sexual betrayal leads to more deaths. When Stan and Johnny's widowed father disappears, Johnny must look after his brother on his own. Stokoe stays true to a bleak vision of the world as he enmeshes his characters in the kinds of tragic setups reminiscent of a Thomas Hardy novel." - Publishers Weekly
"Johnny Richardson returns to Oakridge, California, his hometown, after eight years of self-imposed exile. His inattention allowed his younger brother, Stan, to nearly drown and suffer brain damage, and Johnny's guilt hasn't diminished with time. He resumes his relationship with Marla, his former lover, and agrees to help Stan start a business to lease and maintain decorative plants in the gentrifying former gold rush town, but his own emotional burdens and other events soon lead to suicide, murder, and existential threats to Johnny and the people he cares about. Empty Mile recalls the early David Lynch films Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, which dwelled on sordid and creepy events in picturesque small towns. Stokoe, like Lynch, portrays Oakridge as a place of stunning beauty that happens to house a roiling cauldron of human jealousy, venality, depravity, and violence. His pace may be a bit too measured. Some crime fans might lose patience, but as the threats mount, he'll have readers right where he wants them: by the throat." - Thomas Gaughan
"To say Matthew Stokoe's Empty Mile is dark is an understatement of Herculean proportions. But there are glimpses of light, moments of grace, and characters that, despite their bad acts and shortcomings, are honestly human [...] A story of brotherhood, imperfection, and the huge toll that unresolved guilt and shame can... take on our lives, the book made each evening's return to its shadowy pages a gift." - Shelf Unbound
"Dark and disturbing, yet highly captivating, Matthew Stokoe's novel EMPTY MILE is proof of the human heart's complexity. [...] Deeply riveting and packed with villainous characters that make Satan look like the Easter Bunny, EMPTY MILE is a novel that you just can't miss." - Sacramento News and Reviews
"I know it's only August, but Matthew Stokoe's EMPTY MILE is a contender for my crime novel of the year. This book has everything a good crime novel should: a suspenseful story with violence at its core, characters driven by lust, love and guilt, propelled with prose that's poetic and profound. [...] Stokoe brilliantly mines what happens to a person when shame and guilt fester." - Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
"Danger permeates this expertly plotted story from start to finish [...] with a 21st-century-California setting but dialogue that could have been spoken by Bogart (as well as the occasional purple simile ˆ la Raymond Chandler), Empty Mile [...] reaffirms basic knowledge of good and evil and how action alters destiny. Johnny [the protagonist] is typical only to a certain point. Once enmeshed in the plot's relentless coils, he enters another dimension-one in which good people don't stay good for very long." -Washington City Paper
"Matthew Stokoe's Empty Mile exemplifies everything that makes good noir so gut-strumming. Surprising, edgy, dangerous, nihilistic, and totally bad-ass." - Tom Piccirilli
"The tension builds unbearably in this magnificent 'Sierras Noir' novel. Stokoe writes damaged people worthy of James M. Cain and Jim Thompson. His star-crossed lovers and broken families will steal your heart, even as Stokoe drives the knife home. I couldn't stop reading." - Denise Hamilton
"No point in turning up the 'brightness' on your set. Empty Mile is a failed-brakes careen of guilt and payback, a Lynchian labyrinth of obsession, secrets, and revenge in small-town America." - Janet Fitch
"Like the best noir, Empty Mile is rife with desire, desperation, and despair. Matthew Stokoe's people have dubious motives, ugly secrets, crushing guilt, and suffer dire consequences. But they're redeemed by the rarest gold in contemporary crime fiction--an author's genuine empathy." - Eddie Muller
"I have to say that the word “mystery” turns me off when I’m digging for a new read. Being the ignorant student of literature that I am, my mind immediately assumes the word “mystery” to entail any and everything having to do with Sherlock Holmes, Stephen King, and CSI. Every preview of Matthew Stokoe’s upcoming novel, Empty Mile, pinned the badge of mystery-noir to its cover, and, of course, made me uneasy. Now, I repent for my sin. Stokoe’s myriad of sinister puppeteers, pseudo-antagonists, and desperate human targets weave within a plot built to plunge nowhere-town America into a patch of true black-noir, leaving it anything but typical mystery.
When Johnny Richardson returns to his home in the rural mountain town of Oakridge, California, his motive is simple: confront his troubled past that sent him running eight years prior. Haunted by a tragic accident that left his younger brother, Stan, mentally challenged, Johnny finds himself searching for forgiveness in his desperation to piece together the seemingly stable life he thought was waiting for him.
However, as he reconnects with his lost love Marla, their careless lust leads town councilman Bill Prentice’s wife to suicide, thus unfolding a series of events aimed at tearing Johnny and those closest to him to pieces. With the mysterious disappearance of their father, Johnny and Stan find themselves the owners of a desolate stretch of land dubbed Empty Mile, and are left with little explanation for their father’s purchase of the forest meadow. Their search for stability is halted as they become the target of revenge, and Johnny tries his best to uncover the truth behind their suffering while clutching the life that is slowly slipping between his fingers.
Stokoe drives the story with a full-steam narrative that puts little brake to the high-speed mystery. In its highs, Empty Mile sprints at a pace that leaves your fingers twitching as you tickle the next page. Johnny and Marla share the perfect troubled love for a noir, and their struggle to maintain affection through distress consistently feeds the side-monsters working throughout the novel’s plot. Stokoe writes with a smooth clarity that allows the reader to speed along with the story’s momentum, and his detailed description of Oakridge make for a strong, active setting.
However, at times, the characters step out of their element as they seem to be momentarily blessed with flawless detective minds not seen prior. Though these moments of genius are rare, they also seemed blessed with blind stupidity in certain circumstances in order to allow the author to delay major plot turns and realizations. At times, Stokoe makes irresponsible use of convenience rather than realistic discovery to drive the plot in the direction he intends, and important factors of the rising action come to the characters too easily.
Perhaps his biggest flaw in the novel is Stan, Johnny’s mentally challenged brother. The gap between the extremities of Stan’s condition are too vast—at times, he is seen as a 22-year-old boy romping around in his superhero costumes playing dumb in Looney Tune fashion, and at others, acting perfectly normal and exhibiting portions of the intelligence he possessed before the accident. His dialogue and actions border the line of stereotype and insult, and take a great risk in offending readers tender to the subject.
Despite the negative, Empty Mile commits the reader to the story from the first chapter. Some turns are foreseen, others come from the blue. Ultimately, Stokoe forces readers to comply with the bends and turns of his devious plot, and awards them with an ending that promises not to disappoint. Sometimes it takes the last few pages for the story to knock you to the floor, and Empty Mile draws the rubber band to the snapping point before letting it recoil back into the reader’s face." - JT Langley
"Prerelease buzz for Matthew Stokoe’s latest has hit a vuvuzela-esque pitch, with high-profile praise coming in from the likes of Janet Fitch and Eddie Muller. Unfortunately, Stokoe’s poorly written novel doesn’t come close to “the best noir” or anything resembling a crime novel. What it lacks in plot it makes up for in abundant scenes of sexual coercion that reek of misogyny.
After an irresponsible tryst in the woods with his best friends's girlfriend, Johnny finds himself to blame for his younger brother Stan's near drowning and subsequent brain damage. Empty Mile opens with his return to his hometown of Oakridge, California, after a guilt-induced eight year sabbatical. The girlfriend, Marla, inexplicably takes him back, and Johnny starts a plant-delivery business with Stan.
Though Johnny seems like a reasonable, middle-class person (he could afford, after all, to run away to London of all places) and Marla a responsible, working adult, they accept an offer to have sex in front of a man for a mere $200. "I'm afraid I need the money too badly," Johnny says, and she agrees. This desperate scheme, launched by two people with roofs over their heads, is ludicrous, and their sexual escapades sets off a disastrous course: Johnny and Marla are blamed, and subsequently blackmailed, for a suicide. Marla reveals that she's been "hooking" for Gareth (Johnny's former best friend) ever since Johnny left. What follows is a seris of distasteful episodes in which Marla is forced to have sex with practically every man in the book while Johnny watches, supposed helpless.
Stokoe treats nearly every page in Empty Mile as an opportunity for some insane request along the lines of "And now, to seal the bargain, I'd like your girlfriend to take care of me." Cue blow job. Are we really supposed to believe that a capable, seemingly intelligent woman recovering from a breakup would decide that prostitution is a great way to earn some extra cash on the weekends?" - Jessica Ferri
"From the outset of this heartbreakingly powerful contemporary noir, Stokoe gets the reader deeply emotionally invested in his guilt-ridden narrator, Johnny Richardson. Eight years after leaving his hometown of Oakridge, Calif., in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains, Johnny returns to face the consequences of a reckless youthful act.
When Johnny Richardson comes home to the town of Oakridge he has one thing on his mind--putting right a terrible mistake he made eight years ago. Revisiting the past, though, is a dark and dangerous game in small town America. When a careless sexual episode leads to the suicide of the town's first lady, Johnny finds himself the target of a revenge campaign that threatens to tear apart the fragile world he's built with his brain-damaged brother and depressive girlfriend among the gold-bearing mountains of Northern California.
Left an unexplained piece of land when his father mysteriously disappears, Johnny must unravel its secrets in a desperate bid to protect those he loves. His efforts to do this, though, have deadly consequences and will ultimately force him to confront not only his own failings, but the very nature of guilt itself.
A searing meditation on the futility of trying to right the wrongs of the past, Empty Mile blends elements of thrilling urban noir with the wide open spaces of outdoor adventure in a story that reflects America's contemporary uncertainty about itself.
Stokoe's first mainstream crime-fiction novel will shock and awe." - vjbooks
"In Matthew Stokoe’s latest effort Empty Mile, Johnny Richardson returns to his hometown after an eight year absence, reconnecting with a life abandoned. In a dark, partly noble, partly illogical narrative, Stokoe throws Johnny back into the restraints of his old life, now heavy with guilt, resentment, and violence, which carry the novel from start to finish.
Stokoe jumps in immediately to explain the circumstances surrounding Johnny’s departure: a long friendship broken when Johnny falls in love with his best friend’s girlfriend, and his younger brother’s near-drowning at a nearby lake while under his supervision, which results in permanent brain damage. While Stokoe sets the stage for a justified departure, he’s not as clear when about depicting Johnny’s reason for returning except to hint at redemption for having left his widower father to care for his brother.
Johnny's return is ominous almost from the start. Within days of arriving, he is awkwardly reunited with the major players in his former life, almost all of whom took somewhat unbelievable turns for the worse. Marla, his emotionally strung out ex-girlfriend, is even more emotionally bereft, with one foot in the real world and the other in prostitution, an occupation she was forced into by Johnny's former best friend Gareth. Desperate and painfully gullible, she occasionally spouts off deliberate one-liners: “Sometimes I can’t believe what we’re capable of,” she says. “The things we do...it seems like we’re programmed to destroy ourselves.” Profound and apt as it may be in context, it’s almost as if Stokoe is trying to back-track and give Marla’s mess of a life an inkling intellectual depth when everything in her character negates it.
Having been appropriately informed of Marla’s part-time profession and Gareth’s involvement, Johnny finds himself not exacting revenge or justice for Marla but becoming a pawn in the game. This, however, is not the main plot of the story. The primary narrative, a far fetch from the belly under which it started, is set around a piece of property Johnny’s father purchases, called Empty Mile, an area legendary in the region for remaining strangely barren of gold during the original rush that gave root to the rest of the town. When Johnny’s father disappears just after making his son promise not to sell the property, Johnny inherits the barren land and must research his father’s footsteps to answer an overwhelming barrage of questions: Why this land? What is he supposed to do with it? Why now? This part of the narrative is easily the more interesting and focused part of the book and this is mainly due to Stokoe’s depiction of Johnny’s research on the property, the history of the land and the unsurprising connection to Gareth. That the property has a connection to Gareth seems like a loose string barely connecting the two dramas, but at least there’s a plot with a line to follow.
The inclusion of this plot then gives life to another issue: The dialogue in Empty Mile seems to serve no purpose other than being awkwardly expository. Stokoe’s characters often speak in long paragraphs, at times confessing more than can be reasonably expected. Though their actions are increasingly nonsensical and extreme, their justifications lurk just beneath the surface and need only a hint of prodding to purge egregiously. When Johnny first meets his elderly neighbor Millicent, for example, she rambles with specifics:
“Down in the trees at the bottom of the meadow. Made such a racket I went down to have a look. They had this thing like a big corkscrew with a gasoline engine that they held between them. Bored right into the ground. I don’t know how they thought they were going to string wire through all that brush. But then, your father didn’t look too much like the practical type, and I don’t think they drilled more than a handful of holes.”
Later Marla’s disturbing monologue describes her descent into her present circumstances:
“I was in a bad way. The kind of bad way where the world around you seems smashed to pieces and you feel smashed right along with it. I didn’t have anything left to care about anymore. . .The night I decided to do it, it felt like everything left of me worth saving or protecting was so close to dying it didn’t matter what I did. So I got in my car. . .and I stood on a street corner where there were some other girls doing the same thing...and I did it.”
Empty Mile ends lazily and unsurprisingly, with nearly every character the victim of gratuitous violence. “My guilt had become the structure of my world,” Johnny reflects. “It was not the fixing of guilt that was important, but learning to find a way to come to terms with it, to understand that the past must be lived with, not forever battled against”—seemingly prolific words, except that with the all the narrative turns, readers may find themselves apathetic to Johnny’s redemption quest, let alone any reflection he may have on the events that transpire.
At its best, Empty Mile is imaginative and filled with enough dramatic tension and suspense that readers will begrudgingly, if not forcefully, plow through to the end. At its worst, Stokoe has seemingly created two separate narratives loosely connected to a single town; the players superficial and the plot so complicated and convoluted with shock value it’s hard to keep track of who’s doing what to whom and why. It’s not for everyone, but it’s not a total miss." - Samantha Storey
"In high school, we all knew someone who would say really out of control, risqué, and altogether inappropriate things in order to get attention. That guy grew up to be Matthew Stokoe.
If shock is what you are looking for, it won’t last long, as Stokoe overdoes the shock to the point where it’s blasé by the end of the novel. A grotesque cast of characters, gore over story line, and intentionally aimed at being shocking, Cows is not a book that needed to be written or needs to be read. It’s hard as a writer to believe that there could be something written with absolutely no redeeming characteristics but this might be the first book of its kind — a complete waste of paper. If you want to be disappointed with yourself and your bad taste, I recommend picking this up so that you can reminisce on the good old days of that guy in high school, saying gross things to get attention because no one paid any attention to him otherwise." - Michael Kennedy
"The true genius of James M. Cain was conservation. Cain was able to produce more dread, paranoia, and fear within the confines of 120 pages than most novelists can produce in 300. It was a distinct skill which I wish more modern novelists would embrace when they sit down at the computer and slowly chisel away at their massive 500 page tomes.
I understand the market (or maybe it’s the editors and publishers who demand it?) vehemently demands a higher word count than most novels truly need to justify spending 15-to- 25 dollars on a trade paperback or hardback. But come on, think back on the last 400 plus page novel you cracked open and thought to yourself:
“Yeah, they could’ve shaved 150 pages off of that no problemo…”
Case and point, Empty Mile by Matthew Stokoe
Empty Mile is the story of Johnny Richardson. Johnny grew up in the idyllic medium sized California city of Oakridge with his father and little brother, Stan. Johnny’s life is you’re typical suburban existence, until Stan nearly dies from drowning when Johnny is suppose to be watching him, but he instead slips off with his sociopathic best friend’s girlfriend, Marla, to have sex. The accident causes permanent brain damage in Stan and emotionally scars Johnny to the point where he begins to violently act out. His behavior becomes so erratic that he feels the only way he can break himself of his self destructive behavior is by leaving Oakridge and living abroad.
Eight years pass and Johnny finally returns home to an Oakridge that is distinctly darker when he left. Stan has grown into an eccentric man child, his ex-girlfriend Marla—an already emotionally damaged woman when they first met—has become lost in a world of part time prostitution and self loathing, and his former best friend Gareth forcibly pimps Marla through blackmail. The only thing that hasn’t seemed to change is Johnny’s distant real estate salesman father.
It doesn’t take Johnny very long to jump back right into the life he so readily abandoned eight years previously, even going so far as to opening a plant grooming business with Stan and start dating Marla again.
Marla has become even more desperate and broken and pines for Johnny and the life they might have had together if he hadn’t left. Johnny feels the most guilt over their relationship and attempts to quickly repair it. However their first attempt at intimacy happens at the same spot at the lake where Stan drowned and happens because a local city councilman pays them to have sex while he watches. The entire act ends up being filmed by Gareth in order to blackmail the councilman, and when Gareth mails the DVD to the councilman, his depressed wife views the recording and commits suicide. The councilman’s brother-in-law, the ruthless Jeremy Tripp learns of the recording and blames Johnny and Marla for his sister’s death and sets out to destroy the two of them.
Empty Mile marks Stokoe’s first foray into strictly Noir territory after penning two of the best examples of so-called “transgressive” fiction—Cows and the infamous High Life—and it has all the makings of a superior Noir: Sex, violence, greed, betrayal, the problem is that none of these elements manage to coalesce or even become remotely believable. The character of Johnny Richardson is, for a lack of a better term, a dead fish. He’s so detached that through out most of the book you find it hard to believe he inspired so much heartache from Marla, or hero worship and faith from his little brother. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind reading unlikable characters, in fact I prefer it, but Johnny isn’t likable or unlikable, he’s simply there moving from one scene to the next without any real emotional involvement.
What hinders Empty Mile the most, though, is how overburdened it is in minute details. Stokoe simply tells the reader too much and manages to spend most of the novel telegraphing plot points, so when a revelation which is meant to shock come to light, the reader is already expecting it.
I still consider Stokoe to be one of most powerful and evocative novelists currently writing, but with Empty Mile, I wish he had taken a page from James M. Cain’s book and carved a solid 200 pages off the top." - Keith Rawson
"Matthew Stokoe's new book Empty Mile is, in a word, breathtaking. It's true that fans of Cows and High Life may be disappointed at the relative lack of explicit violence (if you thought that's what those books were really about you've missed the point) but the new novel's rich psychological landscape makes it a far more mature and complex book than either of the other two. Empty Mile is a meditation on guilt, on the desire we all have to change the past, on all the wrongs we'd like to put right. As such it strikes a chord with anyone who has lived any sort of a life. The writing itself is beautifully put together. This is no surprise to anyone who's read High Life, what is surprising, though, is the depth of feeling Stokoe shows for his characters. They are all real people, all with real flaws - from the brain-damaged brother to the beaten-down girl friend we recognize these people - we've seen them on street corners, in bars, at the desk next to us at work - they are people people who have suffered and who've cracked under that suffering. The book's plot is intricate and nicely noir-ish and alone would made an excellent read, but the emotional interplay between the characters is what really gives this novel its strength - I read the book in three sittings and by the end of the virtuoso finale I was in tears - literally. If you want brainless sex and violence avoid this book. If you want to read something that will stay with you long after you turn the last page, something that that will reach deep inside you and address one of the most human of themes get a copy while there are still some left." - Randolph Scott
"Matthew Stokoe's Empty Mile succeeds at showcasing the broader themes of remorse and regret apparent in any well-written noir, but stumbles over more immediate aspects of the genre, like believable minor details and logical plotting. The novel opens abruptly with Johnny Richardson's homecoming to the small town of Oakridge, CA and an offhand explanation of why he fled the country for England: Johnny's younger brother Stan suffered brain damage due to a swimming mishap that was only half Johnny's fault. Unfortunately, this early revelation leaves little chance to build the tension required to create a more satisfying reveal, and sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
Johnny reunites with his abandoned love, Marla, and moments later they are asked to have sex in the woods while a town politician watches —the take, 200 bucks. "I'm afraid I need the money too badly," Johnny remarks, despite numerous mentions of all the money he'd saved overseas: "there's no way I could turn down 200 dollars right now... No sir." In a more plausible twist, Johnny murders the politicians brother in law in quasi-revenge, and Johnny's friend Gareth blackmails him with the bloody weapon of choice, a lead pipe, and asks for a ransom: "Dude...I should have a share in the woman." There is an acute feeling, though, that Jonny, with the lead pipe, in the woods could just as well have been Colonel Mustard with the candlestick in the dining room, as the events feel somewhat arbitrary —Stokoe hasn’t allowed the reader to get to know the characters.
Empty Mile finally hits its stride just after the three-quarter marker, when Johnny finds an old diary pertaining to the California Gold Rush and a mysterious piece of land called the Empty Mile, owned by Johnny's missing father. The history lends some much-needed credibility, and helps to stabilize the book for a barn-burning finish. A final murder creates closure for the haggard characters and leads to a dramatic, Dickensian act of self-sacrifice, bringing Stokoe's concern with past regrets to a meandering but definite full circle. Although Stokoe's pacing and ear for emotions in Empty Mile create a book that diehard noir fans would find passable, the structure and hard-to-swallow details leave minor feelings of remorse and regret on the part of the average reader." - Robert Tumas
Matthew Stokoe, High Life, Akashic Books; 2008.
"Set against the sweltering, noirish backdrop of Los Angeles where "money is part of the architecture of the city," this bleak, violent novel upholds English author Stokoe's reputation for gritty, sordid fiction (Cows). Jack, a drugged-out tabloid fanatic and wannabe Hollywood star, grows worried when his wife, Karen, a street prostitute, goes missing for several days. He discovers that she has been murdered ("gutted like a fish") and that he is under investigation by Ryan, a sleazy minor vice cop, who takes on the homicide case himself since he was previously one of Karen's customers. Jack makes a promise to himself to find Karen's killer while supporting himself by becoming a hustler. Stokoe's plot thickens by way of urban legend. Before her disappearance, Karen confessed to Jack that she had sold one of her kidneys for $30,000 to a mysterious doctor trawling Hollywood Boulevard. After a succession of vile sex dates, Jack winds up face-to-face with Bella and Powell Vernier, an incestuous father and daughter surgical team who might be implicated in Karen's murder. Accusations and dead bodies (not to mention necrophilia) emerge just as Jack's acting career begins to take off. Stokoe's in-your-face prose and raw, unnerving scenes give way to a skillfully plotted (though largely implausible) tale that will keep readers glued to the page, if they can stomach the gratuitous obscenities and the excessively graphic descriptions of sex and violence (and violent sex). Stokoe's protagonist is as gritty and brutal as they come, which will frighten away the chaste crowd, but the author's target Bret Easton Ellis audience could turn this one into a word-of-mouth success." - Publishers Weekly
"How does a contemporary author update classic noir writers like James M. Cain and Jim Thompson? For Stokoe (Cows), the solution is to ratchet up the sex by several notches. Jack, an English transplant to Los Angeles, is totally immersed not only in bodily fluids but also in the mythos of Hollywood. He gains sustenance from obsessing about the lives of every Tom, Brad, and Leonardo in Hollywood - which comes at the expense of what passes for his real life. For about a year, he's been married to a practicing prostitute who has recently sold one of her kidneys. When she goes missing, he goes out to find her (or her body), an attempt that plops him amid a cast of kinky characters, including porn-star Rex and police officer Ryan, who leaves a trail of slime in his wake. Above all, though, are Bella and Powell, who give new meaning to the concept of keeping their marriage fresh. While Stokoe has the noir cadences and atmosphere down pat, and Ryan is a character of quintessential sleaziness, the relentless rough sex ultimately becomes as boring and mechanical as thumbing through Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Purchase where demand warrants." - Bob Lunn
"Among the many things my wife and I disagree about, one big point of philosophical contention is the relative merits of trashy talk shows. After the usual battle for the remote, we watch as Ricki valiantly tries to talk slutty-dressing moms into their suburban-hausfrau makeovers or Maury counsels deadbeat boyfriends while they wait for the results of the paternity test, while I nurse my rapped knuckles and wait for the hour that stretches to come to its merciful conclusion. My wife maintains that she loves watching the parade of rednecks and mutants marching toward the inevitable Springer-induced smackdown because it puts any problems she may have into their proper perspective. I, on the other hand, find these shows difficult to watch because the last thing I need is one more reason to mourn for my species.
In any case, there is one point regarding the talk shows (and their inbred cousins of the Real World, ElimiDATE, and Survivor ilk) on which we are in complete agreement: we are both constantly amazed that, as “reality programming” enters its third decade of full flower, there are people who eagerly volunteer to go on national television and air their dirty laundry for the world at large. Even after countless fistfights, public humiliation, the dissolution of marriages, endless litigation, and a couple of well-publicized deaths, there is still no shortage of people willing to forego security, dignity, and the order of their lives for the chance to appear on television, even at its least glamorous. It’s the classic Mephistophelian bargain. After half a century of manufacturing desire, TV at last offers pieces of its glittering self to the less-than-beautiful people—if they’re willing to pay the price.
Matthew Stokoe’s brutal novel High Life explores the lengths one man will go to for a shot at stardom, and to say those lengths are extreme would be an understatement. From Raymond Chandler to Nathanael West to James Ellroy, the “dark underbelly of L.A.” novel has always been an exercise in one-upmanship, to see who can create the starkest contrast between the surface of Hollywood glitz and the sheer depravity that lies beneath it. Stokoe takes the baton and runs with a glee that borders on the psychotic—this is not a book for the squeamish.
Stokoe’s protagonist is Jack, a fully confirmed acolyte of the Hollywood Dream whose holy writ are the print and video tabloids. Jack could not begin to tell you about the history of cinema, the auteur theory, or mise-en-scene, but ask him how much Tom Cruise pulled down for his last picture or what Bruce Willis paid for a house and he’s your boy. Celebrities, Jack maintains with obsessive certainty, are the only people who matter, whose lives are envied but untouched by the rest of the world, proof against need and unpleasantness and circumstance. Jack came to L.A. in search of the elusive golden doorway to that world, but as the novel begins all he has is a job in a donut shop, a telehosting class that’s going nowhere, and a hooker wife named Karen who bought him a Honda Prelude after selling a kidney to one of her tricks and then disappeared. After eight days of searching, Jack finds her body, sliced open and disemboweled and dumped in a drainage ditch, and what started out as rock bottom begins to go even further downhill.
Rather than inspire grief, Karen’s death catalyzes a metamorphosis in Jack. Never exactly a sympathetic soul to begin with—and it is to Stokoe’s credit that Jack has virtually no likeable qualities and still captures our attention—Jack finds a new sense of liberation in embracing the sordid world of pushers and hustlers that populate the seedy side of Hollywood. Though ostensibly he is searching for Karen’s killer, suspecting a link between her murder and whomever bought her kidney, Jack’s detetcive work is lackadaisical at best, taking a back seat to new thrills like peddling his own ass on the street and inflicting cruelties on the homeless with the detached amusement of the newly minted sociopath. Rex, a hustler friend of Karen’s, gets Jack a gig with an escort service, and while playing the devoted boyfriend of an actor at a party thrown by a libertine TV producer, Jack runs into Bella, a wealthy thirtysomething of questionable morals who takes a raptor’s interest in Our Hero and offers to make his show-biz dreams come true. Soon Jack finds himself on a fast track to minor stardom as the cohost on his favorite video-tabloid gossip show—new clothes, new car, new house, and most importantly, a new life as one of the people who matter.
Naturally in all this buttermilk there has to be a fly or two. One is an LAPD cop named Ryan, who was one of Karen’s johns and suspects Jack of her murder, but who also seems to have an interest in the deepening corruption of Jack’s already-tarnished soul. The other fly is Bella, whose psyche is a full portfolio of moral ambiguities and sexual perversions. Caught between the two of them and his own blossoming dark side, Jack’s odyssey reads like a tour of Hell conducted by de Sade: oral sex, anal sex, multiple sex, incest, medical play, genital burns, water sports, coprophagy, sex with tools, mutilation, sex with external organs, sex with internal organs, erotic asphyxiation, snuff photos, snuff films, live snuff, simulated necrophilia, actual necrophilia. Stokoe pulls no punches, describing every act in painfully exacting detail, faithfully recording every acid-etched notch on his protagonist’s soul, while maintaining an even pace and tone that informs us that none of this is any more than business as usual in the dark corners of La-La Land. This is L.A. noir at its noirest.
Over the top? You betcha, and there are times in which Stokoe seems to be going for the pure gratuitous shock—one scene with a 14-year-old girl and a jackhammer springs to mind—but the novel never strays far from its central purpose, to force the reader to consider the price he or she might pay for the ultimate prize. As we watch the various threads of Jack’s life come together in a truly devastating series of events that raise the stakes ever higher, the question of how much hell any of us would endure for the promise of heaven is as poignant here as it is in anything by Dante.
High Life isn’t for everyone, not by a long shot, but after reading it that Jerry Springer stuff doesn’t seem that bad." - John G. Nettles
"Matthew Stokoe has gone the only place that was possible for him to go after the visceral extreme that was Cows. Noir, the blackest and most misanthropic of genres, is the only logical destination for a writer of his sick and twisted imagination. High Life, his second novel, is as slick, well-written and pathological as anything that past masters of noir have produced. It is a stunning piece of work, in more ways than one.
Jack is a man who harbours the kind of LA dreams that only Hollywood can muster. He knows that existence is meaningless except for those who are famous. Only the famous can truly exist, they are a race apart, more than human, and to be one of them is what he aspires to. No, aspire is the wrong word, it's what he hungers for more than anything else in the world.
Like countless others his dreams take place against a backdrop of grinding nothingness, of dead-end work, relationships and gazing at a distance at those that have made it. All this changes when his hooker wife, Karen, is found dead in a gutter, sliced open with methodical, surgical skill. Her death takes him on a journey that reaches depths and heights that he can't even imagine.
All of the classic ingredients of Californian noir are here, but Stokoe takes things further than most. His writing is brutal, scatological and perverse. Reading this requires a strong stomach, there are times when you want it to stop. This is anything but light reading. And yet, there is more to this than a catalogue of graphically described horrors. The plot is skilfully worked, the elements of crime writing are not jettisoned in the mounting horrors that he describes. There's also a certain grim humour on display, at times it is impossible not to laugh, even when Stokoe is making us wallow in filth. One can't help but feel that he's enjoying himself immensely…
This is a compelling and gripping novel, but one that made me feel unwashed. Reading this I could feel a thin film of disgust that nothing could wash away. The images stay with you for days afterwards.
Culture does not get more pessimistic than this." - London Book Review
"Compared to Stokoe’s first novel, the wonderfully gruesome Cows (see TBR review issue 15), High Life is almost mainstream, which is to say it has a beginning, a middle and an end, and, in that order; it has identifiable protagonists in a known city - L.A - and no talking cows. For those who thought Cows was going to be a dodgy one-off cult classic from a man with a diseased mind, the opening chapter or so of High Life shows an author of awesome ability. When the sex and violence kicks in the power of the writing dips a little but not the author’s control. The reader is compelled to continue, to wade along with the characters through the excrement, blood and gore and, like the characters, to become numb to the perversions that take place (in graphic detail) every step of the way. It’s grossly outlandish, but it’s not exactly new. Georges Bataille’s 1928 Story of the Eye, for example, has the heroine masturbating with a priest’s plucked-out eyeball, so getting off on the internal organs of others is normal on planet Sick. As I say, one becomes numb; it is almost with a clinical detachment, which is the author’s prose style, that one reads of the snuff rape by jackhammer, the shit eating, the necrophilia, etc., although I have to say I gagged at a line or two concerning some hawked up phlegm. Where it was placed. How it was used . . . er, there goes my dinner again.
Plot? Our protagonist Jack is one-dimensional, his sole ambition is to be a celebrity. All else is superfluous, but the killing and disembowelment of his junkie-prostitute wife awakens another side of him: he’d like to find out who did it. That desire soon sputters out, but he’s forced to pursue the investigation because a bent cop called Ryan, who makes Harvey Keitel’s Bad Detective look like an angel, has Jack tagged as the killer. Another distraction appears in the form of Bella; she’s beautiful, powerful and wealthy enough to buy Jack a rung up the ladder to fame. Jack, basically, has made it; he has everything he ever wanted, but Ryan won’t go away and he uses his power to further muddy the dirty waters.
The point? Yes, well. It’s not a satire so the graphic violence can’t be justified as in a novel like American Psycho. It’s seemingly gratuitous - very deliberately so – in much the way of the sexual violence/abuse in a Dennis Cooper novel. (Interestingly, High Life is the first title under Dennis Cooper's Little House on the Bowery series.) Like Cooper, I suspect Stokoe dregs up the sickest and most extreme scenarios to get the reader’s attention on a variety of levels. Could it be a finger-pointing exercise? Because of its pull, Hollywood, and therefore L.A, has always been seen as the centre for all types of perversions, easy sex or weirdness. People will do anything to get ahead and the casting couch is a reasonably painless ‘step one’. Maybe Stokoe is doing just that, making us look at the Pitts, Depps, Kidmans, etc, and asking "What did they really do to move up the ladder?" Then, with cases like Fatty Arbuckle or on a smaller scale Hugh Grant, maybe the author is also asking us to think about what these overly-rich people do in their spare time, knowing that they can buy any pleasure and knowing that people, like Jack, will do just about anything for money or a hike up the slippery slope. However one chooses to interpret it, High Life, with its highly improbable storyline, is some book, and for me one of the best to come out in 2002. But be warned: this is nasty stuff… now, where’s that spittoon?" - M.G.S. at Barcelona Review
"In my attempt to look for a new author, I tried Matthew Stokoe’s novel High Life, which was mentioned twice in Ken Bruen’s book, The Dramatist. I’ve always liked Bruen’s many references to other authors, and this was an author that I didn’t know. With regard to Stokoe’s writing, Bruen wrote, “It was Chandler on heroin, Hammet on crack, James M. Cain with a blowtorch, and it matched my mood with a mild ferocity. The writing was a knuckleduster to the brain, a chainsaw to the gut. It not so much rocked as walloped the blood with a rush of pure amphetamine. The prose sang and screamed along every page, a cesspit of broken lives illuminated with a taste of dark euphoria. I felt downright feverish. How often is a novel like a literary blow to the system? I felt Jim Thompson would have killed for this. If James Ellroy had indeed abandoned the crime genre, then here was his dark heir.” Then, I was intrigued by a quote by Bruen from Stokoe, “Around me the world seemed to slip sideways and all the things in the room suddenly looked flat and sharply defined, like high resolution photos of themselves that were too intensely concentrated to recognize. I stood in a synaptic freeze and catalogued my idiocy.” High Life starts on the California coast in a public park in Santa Monica with a murder of a prostitute, Karen. She was married to Jack who had come to LA to make his fame and fortune as a television host, but who lost his way via his addictions and his fantasy world. The beginning of the story involved the one-year relationship of this couple and the police detective, Ryan, who thinks he can pin the murder on Jack. About 50 pages into this, I abandoned the book. While I don’t disagree with Bruen’s characterization of the writing, I could not get past two things. The first was the total coarseness, the crudity of the language. It’s not that I’m easily offended, but I usually find such vulgarity is a cover up for more clever and imaginative expression. Furthermore, the foul language was not just an occasional reference. Rather, it was nearly constant. My second problem with the book was the characters themselves. These were truly street people who were caught as they rapidly descended further down a death spiral. Perhaps the language was appropriate for the low-lifes that Stokoe was describing, but I just did not find that this book provided me with the entertaining escapism that I’m looking for." - Men Reading Books
"What a subtle, almost quaint little book American Psycho seems like-now that I’ve read High Life.
Matthew Stokoe’s surgical stab at L.A. noir is the first in a series called Little House on the Bowery, selected by queer punk icon Dennis Cooper and published by thriving New York underground press, Akashic Books. Set in the mid-’90s when Pam and Tommy were happy and Brad and Gwyneth were blond and probably getting married, High Life is the story of Jack, whose only dream is to be a tabloid television journalist. Okay scratch that, he also dreams of screwing dead girls, although this is a fantasy implanted by Ryan, a minor vice cop, who has taken it upon himself to find out who murdered Jack’s wife, Karen.
Karen’s body has been discovered disemboweled and pumped full of semen. The only leads Jack and Ryan have are: Karen was a hooker, Karen recently sold one of her kidneys for $30,000, and Karen had a tattoo on her shoulder that has been sliced off.
Ryan seems to have had some kind of relationship with Karen, which Jack starts to suspect when he notices Ryan stroking what’s left of Karen’s private parts in the morgue. Ryan suspects Jack, and at one point to taunt him gives him a picture of another dead girl sodomized by a crowbar, and forces him at gunpoint to masturbate, claiming he needs a DNA sample for the lab.
This isn’t exactly the start of Jack’s descent into extreme perversion. That pretty much started when he moved to L.A. and married a hooker. But the clunky premise Jack offers as a reason for telling us this story is that he’s really just an ordinary guy forced by circumstance to confront the evil that lurks within many of us.
Thus, in the right environment (i.e. L.A.), just about any guy might find himself turned on by a live sex show where an innocent girl is being raped to death with a jackhammer.
And given enough money, power and beauty, any girl might want to test the most extreme limits of morality. Enter Bella, Jack’s new girlfriend. A self-styled philanthropist at heart, she’s using the family money to finance a organ donor clinic, where she likes to do the operations herself, unfettered by anything as ordinary as a medical licence.
I could be accused of ruining the suspense by revealing some of these scenes, but believe me these are just a small sampling from a book filled with brutal, revolting sex, and as much feces and urine as you’re likely to see in a typical month of changing diapers. And suspense is really not the compelling element. It’s actually the unflinching blandness of Jack’s voice that is strangely addictive, not unlike the siren songs of the drones from Entertainment Tonight.
High Life could be read as a metaphor for the reptilian underbelly of the Hollywood dream. It could also be read as a relentless exercise in misogyny, though when you get to the jackhammer scene, mean, wordy criticism feels a little lame.
Despite all the numbing moments of brutality, however, there are a few exceptional moments of talented writing. Stokoe shows great insight into the architecture of envy, and there are times when he makes you feel clearly why fame and wealth feel desperately important to someone who has sunk to a certain level of soullessness.
It’s impossible to recommend this book. Hardcore Brett Easton Ellis fans may like it, though they may also be disappointed in the lack of satire. There are some funny lines, though it’s unclear how intentional they are. After finishing it, however, I will say I feel weirdly purged. As though I’ve now done an excruciating and thorough penance for every episode of E.T. I’ve ever watched." - Juliet Waters
"Matthew Stokoe's first novel, Cows, is the kind of sucker punch that actually grabs hold, tears the skin of your belly wide, and hollows out your abdominal cavity, all for the sake of being bored and wanting a snack. How do you follow up something like Cows? You're basically inviting yourself over the cliff of the sophomore curse.
High Life does, in fact, suffer from said sophomore curse, albeit briefly (and in the ugliest of manners). For a few pages, Stokoe seems to have lost all the sense of pacing that made Cows a novel that commanded you to read it in one sitting. Unfortunately, for "a few" here, you can read "the first half of the novel." It starts out slow-- glacially slow. Even though in the opening pages you're treated to a disembowelled corpse, a necrophiliac cop, and more drugs than you can shake a stick at, you're likely to have a relatively rough time getting through the first hundred or so pages.
Once the novel picks up, though, the old Stokoe comes back, and with a vengeance. There are fetishes in this book I'm relatively sure don't even have names yet. Stokoe's rather distressing knowledge of the Hollywood drug trade gets mapped over into a discussion of the trade in anonymous black-market organs, we revisit some of the scarier scenes in Cows from a Hollywood perspective, and, if it's possible, things get even more disgusting than they did in Cows. The first half of the novel crawls; the second flies. Like Stokoe's first book, the second half of this one will keep you up late wondering how this maniac thinks this stuff up.
High Life is, at its heart, a murder mystery. Its protagonist, Jack, is a thoroughly shallow narcissist whose sole ambition in life is to become an actor, for he believes that actors are archetypes of humanity, perfect beings who will, in a way, never die. As the book opens, Karen, his prostitute wife, is found dead and mutilated in a park not far from their place. Jack is immediately suspected of the murder by Ryan, an aging, nitro-popping cop who's got, shall we say, some very serious issues. Jack decides that with this incompetent moron on the case, he'd probably be better off solving the murder himself, and, in his own drugs-and booze-fueled way, he sets about doing so, taking a quick detour into prostitution himself in the process.
It's somewhat easier to recommend High Life than it was Cows (about which I said "This book is not for everyone. In fact, it may not be for anyone." despite it making my Top Reads of 2004 list), if only because the unsuspecting, innocent reader is likely to be intrigued by the murder long before Stokoe hits you with both gore-drenched, perverse barrels. If you're willing to put up with a somewhat glacial pace at the beginning and are a fan of, shall we say, the more extreme murder mystery, High Life may well be right up your alley. (As with Cows, though, it helps-- a lot-- to have a very strong stomach.) Those of you already inured to the antics of more extreme artists, however, would be better advised to go looking for Stokoe's harder-to-find, but punchier, first effort." - Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal"
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