Snuff

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 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.

from Chuck Palahniuk, The Master Of Literary Mayhem And Provocation, A Full-frontal Triple X Novel That Goes Where No American Work Of Fiction Has Gone Before.

the Washington Post - Lily Burana

if His Sentences Are Occasionally Rough-hewn And His Endings A Bit Too Fantastical, So Be It. No Other Contemporary Writer Makes Raging Against The Machine So Compulsively Readable…to The Last Page, snuff Is A Moralistic Work, But Not In The Way Of Tedious, Partisan Bickering About The Dangers Of Porn. snuff Is, Instead, A Meditation On Immortality, Ambition, The Lure Of Risk, The Need For Stability And, Ultimately, On Leaving A Legacy. The Question Isn't Why Palahniuk Would Take On Such An Off-putting Subject, But Rather, What Took Him So Long. Chuck And Porn. Porn And Chuck—the Two Go Together Like Fists And Brass Knuckles, Moth And Flame: A Fatalistic Coupling That Happens To Be, Also, A Perfect Match.

**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? In the crowded greenroom of a porn-movie production, hundreds of men mill around in their boxers, awaiting their turn with the legendary Cassie Wright. An aging adult film star, Cassie Wright intends to cap her career by breaking the world record for serial fornication by having sex with 600 men on camera—one of whom may want to kill her. Told from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, Mr. 600, and Sheila, the talent wrangler who must keep it all under control, Snuff is a dark, wild, and lethally funny novel that brings the presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction. A full-frontal triple-X novel that goes where no American work of fiction has gone before. A porn star intends to cap her career by breaking the record for on-screen fornication