Snuff (Hardcover)

by Chuck Palahniuk (Author)
Key Phrases: talent wrangler, bear dude, stopwatch girl, Cassie Wright, Branch Bacardi, Dan Banyan (more...)

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.

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; 1 edition (May 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385517882
• ISBN-13: 978-0385517881
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (132 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #43,455 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 106 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Snuff, As In "Not Quite Up To", May 29, 2008

By	Mark Eremite "This Is A Display Model Only" (Seoul, South Korea) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

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.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not up to Snuff, May 25, 2008

By	Tyler Durden - See all my reviews

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.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars WOW, June 12, 2008

By	PEAN "PEAN" (USA) - See all my reviews

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.