1) It was the winner of a contest run by Terry Pratchett when he was alive. (Its theme was "anywhere but here, anytime but now")
2) It knows how terrifying cows are.
I mean, 500kg horned beasts with four stomachs and a tendency to stampede... forget wolves! Cows are what you should be worrying about!
As I rarely see evidence that anyone else shares my moophobia, it was perhaps inevitable that I would buy the book. I hoped for an udderly terrifying reading experience, as a horror novel about cows is pretty much guaranteed to scare any sensible person half to death.
Unfortunately, it turned out not to be a book I enjoyed.
Our heroes (if one can call them that) are Geldof, a horny teenage boy with a constant rash, Terry, a slaughterhouse worker who cannot wash off the smell of dead meat, and Lesley, a journalist with big daydreams but little talent. When a bio-weapon starts turning mammals into man-raping, man-eating rage-beasts (i.e. horny zombie critters), they all struggle to survive (and maybe find out what happened).
Our main characters may be not particularly interesting, but they are surrounded by characters so annoying that the readers is clearly meant to want them to die. Geldof's mother is a leftwing vegan extremist and terrorist sympathiser who walks around naked all the time, harangues neighbours and bystanders about their lifestyles, forces her son to wear materials he is allergic against, and spends most of her time having lengthy noisy sex. Her husband is a stoner whose main function is to be a penis for her to shag, without a shred of a brain cell or the ability to string a sentence together. Their neighbours are a meat-obsessed abusive right wing xenophobe nutter, his twin bully sons and his wife / their mother, a maths teacher whom Geldof is in lust with.
Pretty much every character is written with disdain, which is quite offputting as it's clear the author simply cannot imagine a pleasant human being and has nothing nice to say about anyone.
So, a cast of annoying caricatures who aren't funny. Not a good place to start with.
Then, as the animals run amok, the plot meanders along without having anything smart or unique to say. It does not feel tense because every character is odious, so it's impossible to care about any of them. There are chases, narrow escapes, gory violence, etc. etc. etc., but the story does not pack a punch. Instead, it feels like a comic strip written by a 13-year-old misanthropic boy, with roughly the same sense of humour (immature and witless) and the same level of empathy (none).
Finally, for a novel named after cows, featuring a cow on the cover, and mentioning cows a lot on the back cover, there are actually precious few cows in the book. All animals become a threat, and aside from cows we see murderous cats, rats, sheep, pigs, squirrells, etc. - cows draw first blood, but after that they only make a few cameo appearances. So the book isn't even scary - who would be afraid of a fast-moving mountain of rabid man-eating rats when there could be a cow instead?
I have no idea how this novel won a contest. I'm vaguely surprised it was published. Don't waste money on it: it's a load of cowpats.
Rating: 2/5
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