From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, a full-frontal Triple X novel that goes where no American work of fiction has gone before
Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera. With six hundred men. Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, and Mr. 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny, and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly, and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax?
Snuff
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Palahniuk's audacious ninth novel tells the story of Cassie Wright, an aging porn queen who intends to put an exclamation point on her career by having sex with 600 men in one day on film. The story begins with Mr. 600—the pornosaur who introduced Cassie to the business—as he describes the other 599 actors awaiting their moment on screen. The perspective then shifts to Mr. 72, an adopted Midwestern 20-something who is one of the many young men claiming to be Cassie's long-lost son. Mr. 137, a has-been television star hoping to revive his career, wants to ask Cassie's hand in marriage so that the two can star in a reality TV show. But for a novel centered around a gargantuan gangbang, there's surprisingly little action; the small amount of narrative movement takes place backstage, where the characters attempt to get a sense of one another while waiting for their number to be called. There are sharp moments when Palahniuk compassionately and candidly examines the flesh-on-film industry, but mostly this reads like a cross between the Spice Channel and Days of Our Lives. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Bookmarks Magazine
Palahniuk has followed his tendency towards sensationalism to its logical conclusion and written a novel about a pornographic film, to mixed reactions. Naysayers wrote that Snuff either failed in its satirical role or, worse, Palahniuk has simply run out of ideas and only wants to make readers cringe. Yet other reviewers felt that, as in previous novels, Palahniuk’s strong, character-driven explorations of the unseemly actually reveal a great deal about our society. Certainly, he riffs cleverly on Cassie’s cinematic history (“Gropes of Wrath,” for example). But Palahniuk’s play on movies and literature in the context of this novel perhaps points to an important question raised by the New York Times Book Review: “What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk.”
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
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More About the Author
Chuck Palahniuk's novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Diary, Lullaby, Survivor, Haunted, and Invisible Monsters. Portions of Choke have appeared in Playboy, and Palahniuk's nonfiction work has been published by Gear, Black Book, The Stranger, and the Los Angeles Times. He lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
131 of 144 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
No amount of bad reviews will stop a Palahniuk fan from buying one of his books. I oughta know. I'm one of those fans.
I'm the first to admit that Palahniuk is a one-trick pony, but let's face it, it's a pretty good trick. There are times where it has worn thin, and others where it has struck gold. Essentially, Chuck (may I call you Chuck?) takes a few premises, milks the gastric juices out of them, and tries to blend a cocktail with a little social or psychological merit.
SNUFF, a brisk biopsy of porn, has all the trademark Palahniuk panache, but very little of his elusive elan. Chuck's not what you would call very nice to most of his characters, but buried under vivid piles of meat and blood, they still have hearts, and souls, and yens. Chuck shows us their voids, and whether or not they fill them, somehow we still manage to care.
There are lots of voids in SNUFF, and they get filled in gruesome and graphic detail, but none of them are very much other than raw, pointless wounds. The story, about an aging porn star who wants to break records with a 600-man gang bang, grasps at a few emotional straws -- failed parents and failed dreams -- but never really holds on tightly enough for any of it to matter. It's very much a "going through the motions" installment.
The motions themselves are alright, I suppose, although some of them are bizarrely out of place. Chuck's books are, if anything, catalogues of the grotesque and the arcane, but he usually manages to find some way, eloquently or not, to tie them all together. Here, some of it works (the macabre celebrity factoids and embalment techniques), but some of it is just plain pointless (see the several pages devoted to prison tattoos).
In fact, these little literary curios mostly get in the way. Chuck sets almost the entire story in the basement of the studio set where the film (World Whore Three) is being filmed. But even this limited scenery is very vaguely described. And the five main characters that compose the story (Mr. 600, Mr. 137, Mr. 72, the "wrangler," and the starlet) are equally vague personalities, people who stutter alike, who regurgitate odd-ball trivia at the drop of a hat, and who -- in spite of their gaping holes and yens -- don't inspire much in the way of either sympathy or concern. Mostly, they give Chuck a chance to come up with as many goofy porn movie titles he can, or the opportunity to utilize every single euphemism he can find or think up for the word "masturbator."
It's not a bad book, given what most Palahniuk fans will want or expect, and parts of it are downright hilarious. It's slimy, sick, and will teach you new and interesting ways to exfoliate your face (try cold, used coffee grounds). Unfortunately, that's about it. For a book that deals with such fleshy concerns, it's a shame Chuck didn't try harder to get under the skin.
I'm the first to admit that Palahniuk is a one-trick pony, but let's face it, it's a pretty good trick. There are times where it has worn thin, and others where it has struck gold. Essentially, Chuck (may I call you Chuck?) takes a few premises, milks the gastric juices out of them, and tries to blend a cocktail with a little social or psychological merit.
SNUFF, a brisk biopsy of porn, has all the trademark Palahniuk panache, but very little of his elusive elan. Chuck's not what you would call very nice to most of his characters, but buried under vivid piles of meat and blood, they still have hearts, and souls, and yens. Chuck shows us their voids, and whether or not they fill them, somehow we still manage to care.
There are lots of voids in SNUFF, and they get filled in gruesome and graphic detail, but none of them are very much other than raw, pointless wounds. The story, about an aging porn star who wants to break records with a 600-man gang bang, grasps at a few emotional straws -- failed parents and failed dreams -- but never really holds on tightly enough for any of it to matter. It's very much a "going through the motions" installment.
The motions themselves are alright, I suppose, although some of them are bizarrely out of place. Chuck's books are, if anything, catalogues of the grotesque and the arcane, but he usually manages to find some way, eloquently or not, to tie them all together. Here, some of it works (the macabre celebrity factoids and embalment techniques), but some of it is just plain pointless (see the several pages devoted to prison tattoos).
In fact, these little literary curios mostly get in the way. Chuck sets almost the entire story in the basement of the studio set where the film (World Whore Three) is being filmed. But even this limited scenery is very vaguely described. And the five main characters that compose the story (Mr. 600, Mr. 137, Mr. 72, the "wrangler," and the starlet) are equally vague personalities, people who stutter alike, who regurgitate odd-ball trivia at the drop of a hat, and who -- in spite of their gaping holes and yens -- don't inspire much in the way of either sympathy or concern. Mostly, they give Chuck a chance to come up with as many goofy porn movie titles he can, or the opportunity to utilize every single euphemism he can find or think up for the word "masturbator."
It's not a bad book, given what most Palahniuk fans will want or expect, and parts of it are downright hilarious. It's slimy, sick, and will teach you new and interesting ways to exfoliate your face (try cold, used coffee grounds). Unfortunately, that's about it. For a book that deals with such fleshy concerns, it's a shame Chuck didn't try harder to get under the skin.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
An over-the-hill porn star wants to go out with a (gang) bang, so arranges for a world record effort with 600 stout and hearty fellows, brave and true. A few of this cast of hundreds are there for more than their allotted 60 seconds of, ah, contact with the legend. She has deep ulterior motives, as do each of the featured characters, and all of their twisted narratives come together in the concluding pages.
Someone is supposed to die as this event climaxes, and most of the folks know it, although their perceptions of the who, when and how don't quite match up. The plans go a bit off the rails, and everyone gets more or less what they deserve.
The main characters certainly have had enough of the world, with what they have made of it, with their fortunes having turned on single instances and bad choices, in this case almost all of them sexual. Most everyone is ragingly bitter and resentful, untrue and self-serving, bent on rectifying only their problems, regardless of effects on others. The story runs on damaged adults hurting others, intentionally and instinctively, out of selfishness and revenge, or even to manufacture a more compatible companion. It's about the need for fame, the need for redemption, the resentment of future lost, and the clawing need to retain one's perceived best position, all taking place in arena of porn, the "...job you only take after you abandon all hope."
This is not a novel about the sex industry, but there is some behind-the-scenes detail. Palahniuk's detailed portrait of the washed-up porn star Miss Cassie Wright is not as complete and detailed as I had anticipated. I don't know why, but every time I pictured her, a strange combination of Kitten Natividad and Lisa DeLeeuw came to mind. Ah, but I digress. She is more or less the central character, at least that around which all others and the main story revolve, but I was a tad disappointed in that we didn't get more from her. Much of this was necessary for plot purposes, but I thought we'd get a bit more inside her head, and hear a bit more about what Palahniuk has observed about the porn experience. Cassie is a treasure trove of obscure Hollywood factoids, though, all of them thoroughly fun and enlightening.
And Palahniuk has observed; he slips in what appears to me to be his description of things that come to him, "...a remarkably rarefied set of facts for anyone to reference offhand." It was obvious even in Fight Club with the details about automobile recalls that Palahniuk is a collector of slices of divergent existence and uncommon experience. He's fascinated by the edge of the road, and he collects the esoteric, fascinating and titillating tidbits, saving them for the right time to drop into a story. We saw a very straightforward collection of these experiences in Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. When it's time and the fit is right, these bits add depth to a character, provide the basis for a scene, or serve to power just a soliloquy. We got that in Survivor, with the Palahniuk's extended dissection of the blissful suffering stupor achieved on the Stairmaster. Such is the case here, and this time we get lots of insight on the directly physical aspects of manufacturing video pornography. Most of it has been covered, but Palahniuk manages to show us a few things that are new. We also get details about embalming, the chemical and physical processes of cyanide, and about the sacrifices Hollywood stars made for their careers--not for their craft, mind you, but for themselves.
Palahniuk records detail, and this brings the porn-shoot green room scene into a sharpness of focus that had me wanting to shower after reading. It is unflinching and close-in; I swear I could smell it.
The story has lots and lots of people in it, but only a handful get to speak. The story is all about them, which seems to me to close down the world a bit too tightly. As struck me reading Invisible Monsters, everyone is intertwined, closely and disgustingly, but it seems a bit too close, that everyone is that tied and related a tad too easily. It works to keep the story tight, of course, but it seems that social groups are just not that tight.
Palahniuk's porn-title takes on classic film and literature titles is good fun, with dozens of them sprinkled throughout the book. My personal favorite, unfortunately, is not reproducible in this venue. If anything, just this exercise must have been inspiration enough to bring forth the novel.
The font is large and the pages relatively small; at 197 pages the book reads quickly, in short chapters of about 7-8 pages. Each chapter is the voice and POV of one of the characters, which takes a bit of adjustment. Most can read it all in 3-4 hours. There is very little raw, graphic sex, but lots of descriptions of the business, how things are done. The adult language is profuse and completely liberated; readers put off by profanity need not go on this ride. The language is not clinical, but, ah, straightforward and non-euphemistic professional language for what is brought to the table, and what is then done on the table, under it, with the legs of the table, with the guys who delivered it, their friends, etc.
Bottom line: I enjoyed this story, another off the wall Palahniuk tale populated with thoroughly original characters in a story for which I had no kind of previous reference. It took me to a new and unpredictable situation, with interesting albeit unpleasant characters, in a story that delivers where it counts, right in the end.
Someone is supposed to die as this event climaxes, and most of the folks know it, although their perceptions of the who, when and how don't quite match up. The plans go a bit off the rails, and everyone gets more or less what they deserve.
The main characters certainly have had enough of the world, with what they have made of it, with their fortunes having turned on single instances and bad choices, in this case almost all of them sexual. Most everyone is ragingly bitter and resentful, untrue and self-serving, bent on rectifying only their problems, regardless of effects on others. The story runs on damaged adults hurting others, intentionally and instinctively, out of selfishness and revenge, or even to manufacture a more compatible companion. It's about the need for fame, the need for redemption, the resentment of future lost, and the clawing need to retain one's perceived best position, all taking place in arena of porn, the "...job you only take after you abandon all hope."
This is not a novel about the sex industry, but there is some behind-the-scenes detail. Palahniuk's detailed portrait of the washed-up porn star Miss Cassie Wright is not as complete and detailed as I had anticipated. I don't know why, but every time I pictured her, a strange combination of Kitten Natividad and Lisa DeLeeuw came to mind. Ah, but I digress. She is more or less the central character, at least that around which all others and the main story revolve, but I was a tad disappointed in that we didn't get more from her. Much of this was necessary for plot purposes, but I thought we'd get a bit more inside her head, and hear a bit more about what Palahniuk has observed about the porn experience. Cassie is a treasure trove of obscure Hollywood factoids, though, all of them thoroughly fun and enlightening.
And Palahniuk has observed; he slips in what appears to me to be his description of things that come to him, "...a remarkably rarefied set of facts for anyone to reference offhand." It was obvious even in Fight Club with the details about automobile recalls that Palahniuk is a collector of slices of divergent existence and uncommon experience. He's fascinated by the edge of the road, and he collects the esoteric, fascinating and titillating tidbits, saving them for the right time to drop into a story. We saw a very straightforward collection of these experiences in Stranger Than Fiction: True Stories. When it's time and the fit is right, these bits add depth to a character, provide the basis for a scene, or serve to power just a soliloquy. We got that in Survivor, with the Palahniuk's extended dissection of the blissful suffering stupor achieved on the Stairmaster. Such is the case here, and this time we get lots of insight on the directly physical aspects of manufacturing video pornography. Most of it has been covered, but Palahniuk manages to show us a few things that are new. We also get details about embalming, the chemical and physical processes of cyanide, and about the sacrifices Hollywood stars made for their careers--not for their craft, mind you, but for themselves.
Palahniuk records detail, and this brings the porn-shoot green room scene into a sharpness of focus that had me wanting to shower after reading. It is unflinching and close-in; I swear I could smell it.
The story has lots and lots of people in it, but only a handful get to speak. The story is all about them, which seems to me to close down the world a bit too tightly. As struck me reading Invisible Monsters, everyone is intertwined, closely and disgustingly, but it seems a bit too close, that everyone is that tied and related a tad too easily. It works to keep the story tight, of course, but it seems that social groups are just not that tight.
Palahniuk's porn-title takes on classic film and literature titles is good fun, with dozens of them sprinkled throughout the book. My personal favorite, unfortunately, is not reproducible in this venue. If anything, just this exercise must have been inspiration enough to bring forth the novel.
The font is large and the pages relatively small; at 197 pages the book reads quickly, in short chapters of about 7-8 pages. Each chapter is the voice and POV of one of the characters, which takes a bit of adjustment. Most can read it all in 3-4 hours. There is very little raw, graphic sex, but lots of descriptions of the business, how things are done. The adult language is profuse and completely liberated; readers put off by profanity need not go on this ride. The language is not clinical, but, ah, straightforward and non-euphemistic professional language for what is brought to the table, and what is then done on the table, under it, with the legs of the table, with the guys who delivered it, their friends, etc.
Bottom line: I enjoyed this story, another off the wall Palahniuk tale populated with thoroughly original characters in a story for which I had no kind of previous reference. It took me to a new and unpredictable situation, with interesting albeit unpleasant characters, in a story that delivers where it counts, right in the end.
18 of 21 people found the following review helpful
By B. Hall
Format:Hardcover
First off, let me say that this book is not bad because of its offensive content. In fact, it was less shocking in content and detail than I expected it would be. However, it was bad. Just plain bad. The characters are flat, unlikeable, and boring (not to mention that the four different narrators all sound the same). The plotline goes nowhere. The ending is infuriatingly illogical, unrealistic, and a twist ending for the sake of a twist ending. I like Palahniuk, but this one was awful.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good Book
The book is good so far. I am in the middle of reading 2 other books so I have not been able to devote a lot of time to this.
Published 1 month ago by Chana Cammon
5.0 out of 5 stars
Classic Chuck.
Worth the price, worth the time, and definitely a redeeming story of intended confusion, misdirects, and red herrings. Read more
Published 2 months ago by TreyL7
4.0 out of 5 stars
ok i guess
my daughter got this under my account i have no clue about it maybe it works maybe not buy it and find out
Published 3 months ago by joseph young
4.0 out of 5 stars
Right on Track
It's definitely Chuck. Well researched, a little unsettling, perhaps predictably sick, and not quite as fun as I'd have liked, but it's what you'd expect from him. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Steven Montague
5.0 out of 5 stars
Snuff
Couldn't put this book down for a second. It was a absolutely horrifying, but that's what makes Palahniuk's books so impossible to not find gripping.
Published 5 months ago by Casey Jernigan
3.0 out of 5 stars
Doesn't measure up to other novels by Palahniuk
This is the fifth Palahniuk I've read. It's not my favorite but not my least favorite either. I would put it third or fourth. Probably fourth. Read more
Published 6 months ago by Alain C. Dewitt
2.0 out of 5 stars
Snuff
Okay if you can stomach the disgusting descriptions... Hilarious if you want to keep track of the names of porn films... Not nearly as good of a story as Lullaby... Read more
Published 9 months ago by Jamie Filpi
2.0 out of 5 stars
too clever
I've liked other Palahniuk books I've read. But this one, set during an all-day shoot of a gang-bang porn video, felt like it was more interested in being a humorous list of porn... Read more
Published 10 months ago by G.G. Miranda
3.0 out of 5 stars
Truly good read
I like the no - nonsense style of writing and the topic does bring up disturbing issues which bear keeping mind, such as the world is becoming scarily tolerant in some ways. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Kathryn C. Hogan
2.0 out of 5 stars
meh
Chuck Palahniuk fell off after Fight Club and Choke. IMO he seems like he is tring to surpass those books. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Jesse
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