Snuff

(4.75 Stars)

I'll be honest, Some of the "bad reviews" really confuse me. I understand this is a strange subject to write about, and that porn/sex/erotica make a lot of people "uncomfortable", especially when it involves toys, non-straight sex, drugs, "deviance", etc. But... This is Chuck Palahniuk, he writes about uncomfortable things, and uses characters that come alive on the pages. Yes, this is probably one of his shortest fiction books, but he wrote an interesting story, and honestly, this is classic Palahniuk story telling.

What I am trying to say is... Don't let the bad reviews scare you away. Don't listen to the people claiming this is the beginning of Palahniuk's downfall. Don't believe the people claiming you can look at their show more previous Palahniuk reviews. No... instead, consider this Palahniuk's mission accomplished. He invoked people's Fight or Flight response, separated the wheat from the chaff, and is doing what he does best; making the intangible tangible, the unfamiliar familiar, the misunderstood understood.

Readers of Chuck Palahniuk, and his brand of bizarre absurdist fiction will love this short work. An insightful look into the people who gravitate in and around the adult industry. Their choices, their decisions, their delusions, all delivered in typical Palahniuk style. The regurgitation of strange facts, the characters that stay with you, the anxiety of everything. show less

A lot of people will find the topic of this book offensive and possibly disgusting. I'm not one of those people - it takes a more deranged person than Chuck Palahniuk to gross me out (Hi, Bret Easton Ellis! Glamorama was horrifying.). But I didn't enjoy this one as much as I had hoped because the character voices just weren't that different to me, and I figured out the big "final twist" halfway through. Also, I was a little confused by the ending. So not my fave.

This is a novel about a record-breaking gang-bang featuring one legendary porn queen and six hundred obliging men. Except... it's not. Because Palahniuk's never as simple as that. Told from alternating and often conflicting viewpoints - Numbers 72 (a young man), 137 (a shamed TV star) and 600 (a porn veteran), and the 'talent wrangler', Sheila - this is actually a novel about the seediness of the adult entertainment industry, the vacuity of Hollywood and the deceptive nature of screen beauty. At the opening of the book, everyone looks good and has a reputation to uphold; by the end their secrets have been revealed and the layers of makeup and ego and personal history have been peeled away to reveal something uglier, smaller and deeply show more sad. It didn't rock my world like Rant, which I still occasionally find myself mulling over nearly a year on - but if you're not easily offended it was a relatively quick read and still pulled me on at breakneck pace towards the inevitable bizarre finale...

Favourite part: Palahniuk's trademark devotion to throwing in loads of pithy little facts about his subject, the more offbeat the better - I stopped every few pages to Google something, only to find it was actually true and not just part of his fiction. If nothing else, this novel has been an excellent source of genuinely interesting trivia to throw at people over the last few days! show less

This book sickened me, both from making me laugh and making my stomach churn at the same time. Apart from the many potential - and probably existing - film-titles in this book, there are a lot of traces of Palahniukisms that crept into my mind while reading this seemingly simple story about three men who are among the 600 waiting to have sex with Cassie Wright in the gang-bang that she hopes will take her to history.

Of course, there is more to the tale than this, simply put.

Apart from the wonderful characters, the stories within the story, the history of the main characters, there are a lot of wonderful little facts strewn throughout, which may or may not be true; I feel like it's not very relevant to find out whether or not they show more are.

Palahniuk writes in a very subtle way, which I cannot even fathom doing given the subject. Imagine the Monseigneur Creosote skit in Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life" without the effects, and you might find out what I mean.

And I don't mean he excludes sex, sperm, rubber, sweat, bronzer, the risk of death through too much sex, your mother catching you masturbating, fecal matter, cyanide and Oklahoma.

Highly funny, very recommendable and a small, neat modern classic. show less

Typical Palahniuk, dazzling prose, all kinds of trivia and minutiae about the topic on hand, porn, no less. In the end, fairly harsh and soulless. The book moved along very quickly and I finished it in three days, but did not learn much other than the fact that life in the porn industry is brutal, demeaning and eventually kills you in the end.

First of all, as I log this book, I’m glad my repeated attempts to get my mom on Goodreads have failed. Secondly, the last thing I expected this to be was a family drama… but there were a lot of surprising things here. What else can I expect from Mr. Palahnuisickskck?
I was actually so invested in this that I stayed up late to finish it in one sitting - I couldn’t put it down. That right there gets huge bonus points. But the ending to me was so confusing and unsatisfying that I had to knock off a star.
I love, love, love the amount of absurd trivia thrown in. My search history has become quite interesting, and I have been enlightened regarding the knowledge of lobbed off statue penises in the Vatican and a very horrific way to show more die. Although I gave it 3 stars, this one was more of a hit than a miss for me. It was so short and I couldn’t believe this was actually written, so I just had to read it. show less

The more I read Chuck Palahniuk, the sadder I get. Like most, I was blown away by his earlier work and wanted desperately to believe he hadn't fallen into any kind of predictable pattern. Nevertheless, Snuff is so formulaically Palahniuk that it's a bit frustrating--the kind of book that's a quick, painful read but one that feels like it could have been so much more.

At the center of the tale is an aging porn star named Cassie Wright, who is attempting to break the world gang-bang record by having sex with 600 men in one go. For most of the novel, she hides away in an obscure upstairs film studio while the action settles around three men--Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600--waiting in the crowded green room. Each man has his own reason for show more being there, and as the novel progresses, we learn that each is far more connected to the others than any of them could have imagined (a truth that makes itself graphically clear in the novel's appalling climax).

Part of the Palahniuk formula has always been explicit, random detail, and Snuff delivers in spades. Unlike many of his novels, though, it feels as if the impact of the tidbits falls short because pornography is such a ubiquitous industry that the shock value of talking about sex in a book like this wears off pretty quickly. At the same time, though there are a number of distinct narrators, each feels disengaged from the task at hand. And while that disengagement helps us to see the many secrets each is hiding, it doesn't help the audience feel terribly invested in the proceedings.

Not to mention that the plot itself also falls into the predictability category. Much of the first third of the novel is devoted to a plot twist so obviously telegraphed that a) it's easy to determine, and b) it's even easier to see through. Once you figure out that it's a red herring, other pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place pretty quickly as well, and it doesn't help the "mystery" aspect of the book that the cast of characters is so surprisingly small. The function of each character within the plot becomes clear faster than I suspect Palahniuk wanted, which leaves us with a last-second twist that feels more forced than plausible. It's not so much a cheap shot as an afterthought, which may be worse.

Ultimately, though it's a really short book, Snuff comes off feeling like a short story that's grossly outstayed its welcome. One feels that Palahniuk probably had a great deal he wanted to say with the book, but it didn't all make its way on the page. In books like Haunted, which are pretty powerfully invested in their technique and shocking content, he was making powerful statements as well. In Snuff, he seems more content in making us look away from the page than he is in having us look between the lines. show less