Customer Reviews

Snuff

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(31)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(47)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I can easily say this book was an utter disappointment/disaster. Perhaps it was high expectations or the genius viral marketing, but I was left unfullfiled. Obviously tackling the subject matter at hand is difficult to say the least but I genuinely expected more. The one thing from his other books is that no matter how dispicable the characters are they are all redeemable and likable in the end. I cannot say the same for the charaters in "Snuff". If anything, they all seemed one dimensional, and the woe is me got very annoying. This is to say nothing about the ending. Most of Chuck's books have some element of outrageousness to them but this is just ridiculous. I felt it was absolutely stupid and pointless. I got you, no you got me, but we got them, no I got you, now I am ok with everything. Just RIDICULOUS. I would pass on this and re-read "Fight Club" and/or "Choke". If you feel compelled dust off the old library card and save the $20.

Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favorite authors. Once a year I wait with anticipation for Amazon to ship me his latest offering. This year I could not wait to tear Snuff from the cardboard Amazon package that arrived two days after the release date. Nothing quite like setting down with a new Chuck Palahniuk Novel. So I began reading and after 197 pages I felt nothing. No sense of Wow! Just felt like I read any book by any random author. It didn't have any impact on me whatsover. Although I should have expected it because the fullfilment level has been dwindeling with each recent release. Fight Club 5 stars. Survivor 5 stars. Invisible Monsters 5 stars. Choke 4 stars. Lullaby 3.5 stars. Diary 3 stars. Haunted 3 stars. Rant 2 stars. It seems like a pattern. I found myself not carring about any of the characters in this book and the ending is absolutley goofy. Soddered together........come on Chuck.

Yes, I know Chuck Palahniuk is not to be taken seriously. Yes, I know all his books have plots that do not dive too far into the deep end. Yes, I know his books all have those small little twists that are supposed to bring a smile to our faces. Even knowing all that, SNUFF is one of the worst books I have ever read. And read it I did, until the predictable, unfunny and bitter end.

The story of the world's most famous pornstar giving everything for her last movie, SNUFF actually shifts focus between four different characters, none of them being the famous pornstar herself. The characters are not merely shallow (this is Palahniuk, after all), they are, even worse, boring. None are developed enough to capture our attention, none are witty enough to make us chuckle. And the one with the autograph dog! Really, just how dumb can we get?

We see most of the 'twists' a mile off, and the ones we don't, well, they're really not all that anyway. Added to this is Palahniuk's use of 'factoids' that are clearly filler material for anything better. By the end of SNUFF, I felt like I was the main attraction in such a film and death was to be produced by...reading SNUFF

Do you enjoy reading "clever" porn titles based on hit movies? Do you enjoy reading facts (true or not) about famous Hollywood actors that do nothing to advance the plot whatsoever, but take up about a quarter of the writing? Do you enjoy one dimensional characters, who by the end of the novel you still don't care about? If you answered yes, this book is for you.

I was so bored by this book that it took me two months to read and it is only 197 pages long! I had to force myself to finish only because I have read everything else Chuck Palahniuk has ever written. There really is no story here. Just a bunch of, shall I say "dudes" standing around for about 200 pages. Also, (Spoiler Alert) how can a book be title Snuff and no one dies.

This is a huge disappointment.

I laughed harder while reading this book more than any that I have read for awhile. It is Mr. Palahniuk's trademark twisted, demented norm. This isn't for the faint of heart. I was most impressed by just how well researched this book apparently was. The best part is how there is nothing wasted. Every sentence somehow relates to someone in the story. This is a must read for Palahniuk fans and fans of dark comedies.

Perhaps because I am such a huge fan of Palahniuk, I was more disappointed with this book than I would have been from any other author. I grew enthusiastically used to the sharp cultural satire present in the rest of his works that I expected the same in this one. While it is a nice jab at the porn industry, it has the same shortcomings - substance. The plot and characters have interesting, potentially humorous twists, but never quite fully pan out. While reading it, I was fully entertained, but after finishing I realized that it was entirely forgettable - definitely not up to Chuck's earlier performances. I distinctly remember reactions and emotions I felt from his books from 3 years ago, but not from "Snuff" 2 weeks ago.

This is everything you've come to expect from Palahniuk. Being one of my favorite writers, I wanted to love this. Great idea for his sort of twisted humor. But frankly, it wasn't nearly as well executed as his other novels. It was short, seemed rushed at the end, and wasn't nearly as shocking as one would expect. That said, still solid and funny and worth the purchase for a fan. Pick it up.