The novel follows 25-year-old Steven, who dwells in a faceless American city with his sadistic mother ("the Hagbeast")and 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.
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.