ase and lack of hesitation to kill, whether it be pigs in the local abattoir, or humans such as Mrs. Nugent who he unflinchingly kills, “stick[ing] his hand in her stomach” (p. 195) and further uses the blood from her dissected body to write the word ‘PIG’ on the walls. McCabe thrives off of absurdism through the use of scatology – the comparison of characters (the Nugents and Francie) with animals like pigs and thus the animalisation of human beings. For example in one scene, Francie is caught having defecated on Mrs Nugent’s carpet as if he were a pig, and in this way McCabe seems to delight most in the filthiest and most disgusting scenes in The Butcher Boy by repeatedly introducing scatological, excremental, and grotesque details and placing both Francie and Mrs Nugent in the most embarrassing situations. One could postulate that this is a form of dark satire, yet this in no way correlates with Francie’s life journey through the novel and his fate, two things that are not satirical in the slightest. Particularly when focusing on the scene of Mrs. Nugent’s gruesome death, whilst Francie is revolting against the one force that has maintained his trauma throughout the novel, ironically he is finally accepting his role as someone, if not, something far from being moral and thus human. He isolates himself from everyone, and just like with Alex in A Clockwork Orange where he is seemingly trapped in a life of constant violence and delinquence, Francie is similarly trapped in a vicious cycle of solitude and distress. In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a similar concept undoubtedly emerges in which the dystopic circumstances that Duke and his attorney reside in draw fascination from readers due to the fact that they seem to be so oblivious to living in a completely alternate reality. In one scene, Duke randomly tells a waitress “we’re looking for the American Dream” (p.164), yet from a wider angle the whole novel consists of two protagonists manipulating their vision of the world with hallucinogens and substances and getting involved with violent acts that ultimately lead them down a nightmarish path, dee>