Snuff

This was my first Chuck Palahniuk book and I found myself having to adjust to such a detailed book. I felt that I was actually there, in the room, with all the men waiting to be a part of a porno to make history. I felt like I could smell the thick air that Chuck described and found myself entering a whole new world of literature when reading.

Chuck is gifted in a way that I've never experienced in an author. Every sense is explored with him and every character is so real. It was like learning to read and comprehend all over again. I was using my imagination more vividly than I have in many years.

Finding myself surprised at the end of this book was just another exciting thing about my first experience to Mr. Palahniuk. I cannot wait to explore more of his literary creations!

I honestly find myself at a loss for words having just completed Snuff.

From someone so brilliant to have written the likes of Survivor and Fight Club, comes.. well, this.

This book reads like a Wikipedia article collection, written by thirteen year old boys still searching for the perfect way to describe someone who masturbates. The incessant factoids about porn, Marilyn Monroe, condoms, the gay community, and cyanide could possibly the the most boring, ineffectual and downright idiotic thing I've read in my entire life.

The description is enticing, but this book downright fails to deliver. Chuck insists on creating as many stupid porn titles as he possibly can, sounding like a rehersal for a Saturday Night Live skit before airing, minus any of the humour. The first couple gain a small chuckle, the rest leave you shaking your head. If I had to read one more name for someone who masturbates, I would have thrown the book across the room - had the hardcover novella deceptively marketed as a full novel not cost an arm and a leg.

The plot is unremarkable in every way, the characters utterly unlikeable and unrelatable. Words are repeated, and I feel sorry for whoever edited this 'work' - they're likely out of a job, from all the akward sentences.

You could see the ending of this novel - minus a small 'twist' in the form of the reality in which the two characters will now have to live - coming from a mile away, though they drag it out through disjointed style that forces you to pick it all apart.

If I have anything positive at all to say about this work - the cover is intriguing. Brings back the Linda Lovelace train of thought.

Here's to hoping Palahniuk delivers something worth reading sooner than later.

Not the best Palahniuk book ever but well worth the read. Many people have just dismissed it because of the porn aspect of the story, but it helps make the story. Not for everyone, but Palahniuk never has been for everyone. A good read, but you may feel like talking a shower after.

No one can write utter dysfunction and madness like the master himself. Every time I sit down and open a Palahniuk book I get a bit giddy. I know this book will leave me wondering what just happened but give me one great ride getting there.

Mr. Palahniuk's 8th book, Snuff, tells the tale of Cassie Wright, an aging porn star out to break the mother of all records for the pornography industry. She, in her final role, will sleep with 600 men on film in one shooting.

As you progress through just the beginning of the book you soon realize that no one expects Cassie to live through this, not even Cassie herself.

In the book you read from 3 characters 1st person recounting of them at the shoot. Mr. 72, Mr 137, and Mr. 600. You also get a narration from the days leading up to the shoot and the shoot from Cassie's personal assistant, Shelia.

Mr. 72 believes he is Cassie's son she gave up for adoption after she conceived him during her first adult movie, Mr. 137 is an out of work actor who lost his show due to a gay film he had made, and Mr. 600 is the co-star and believed father of Cassie's child.

Don't worry, it's as messed up as it sounds, but not in the ways you are thinking.

I can't say much more about the book without this review being a spoiler, which I refuse to do in any capacity for any book. Just know that if you enjoyed Palahniuk's other works you know what to expect from this one.

You're not going to have a clue what hit you.

All of Palahniuk's books are very strange, and this one is no exception. Definitely a weird book, but if you're a fan of Palahniuk it's worth a read.

Characters

The book follows four characters, #600, #72, #137, and Sheila. The first three characters are men waiting to take part in an adult film and Sheila is the person organizing everything in the film.

Setting

The book takes place backstage at a porn shoot, yeah, you read that right.

Plot

The best synopsis of the plot I can give without spoiling too much about the story is what the back of the book says. Porn star Cassie Wright wants to end her career with a bang, by breaking the record for serial fornication by having sex with 600 men, one of whom may want to kill her. The book follows three of those men as they wait their turns to "perform." This is a very weird idea that could really only have come from Palahniuk.

Enjoyment

This book is weird, disturbing, and at times very funny with the names of porn titles Palahniuk mentions as well as some other quips that characters make throughout the book.

Overall Grade

A very strange read that fans of Palahniuk should enjoy.

7/10

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Reading Chuck Palahniuk's novels have convinced me of one simple fact: that ever since Fight Club, ol' Chuck is coasting.

Snuff tells the story of a come-back-seeking porno actress trying to break the world group-sex record, as told by the 600 men waiting off-camera to screw her. Now Fight Club was and remains one of the most brilliant books I've ever read, but the disjointed narrative style, repetition, disaffected characters, and aggressive violence that served that book so well have frankly flopped in his other work. Instead we are left with a gross and simple little story. Gross in the childish way where the point is to shock the reader but too immature to be effective or engaging. Group sex is naughty. Peeing on a floor where people walk on bare feet is gross. Guzzling ranch dip, scooping it up with the same chip every time, is something mommy would never let us do.

On a structural level, Palahniuk makes his characters all sound the same. They all say "true fact" and they all like to listlessly recount pornographic and cinematic trivia to anyone trying to hold a conversation. The plot is singular (the entire book is just a bunch of people waiting around in the same room), the twist at the end isn't that consequential, and the end, well, isn't. I will say that the premise is decently interesting as are the various "true fact" stories the Palahniuk tells through his characters. Snuff is the kind of book that can easily be put down and resumed, but all and all really isn't worth your time.

Toss it.

[...]

i adore getting my hands on any palahniuk book that comes my way. i was so excited to read snuff, and it was certainly a page turner! i finished the book so quickly - the pacing was quick and kept me reading more to find out what would happen next. really enjoyed reading it, but in the end it was like an average porn - relatively entertaining while you watch it, but ultimately leaves you wanting more. i was expecting something along the lines of Invisible Monsters: A Novel and i was disappointed. still deals with the emptiness inside everyone, still very fun, but lacking the feeling of satisfaction in the end.

Had scanned the store before buying this book, and saw the 3 star average and stupidly thought, yeah Chuck's work is not loved by everyone but I have loved a lot of his books, will give this one a go.

In high school had to study Charles Dickens "Great Expectations", at the time thought it was a long and labourious read. Amazingly at only 197 pages Snuff felt the same.

It really did not have enough substance to maintain 197 pages, a tight well written short story at 50 pages at most would have been fine to tell this story.

The movie titles at first made me laugh as they brought my mind back to when I was 16, but after a while I found them not so interesting.

The huge amounts of facts and tidbits about actors was interesting, but essentially padding to fill the story out so idoits like me would pay full price for this story that as mentioned above belonged in a short story collection.

If you are a Chuck fan, hopefully you are smarter than me, save yourself some money and do not read this, in this case its best to disillusion yourself and pretend that Chuck has written a book since Diary.

This is the standard Palahniuk, witty, engaging, and edgy. Where else can you find a dark comedy centered around a porn star's death while on the set of a gang bang?

Don't listen to the naysayers commenting on this novel. This is up there with Choke. I was somewhat concerned after reading Lullaby. I thought Chuck may have lost interest in writing good books. He's redeemed himself with this one.

Now, I'm waiting until Pygmy comes out on paperback to see if he can make a good follow up to this one.

After hating the author's last book, to the point of not being able to finish it, and after thinking that his so-called non-fiction compilation was a huge waste of time, I decided to give Palahniuk one last chance. And I can now report that I will never again read another book by this author.

It's not that Snuff is bad. No, there is and ounce of good material in there somewhere. I think this novel would have made an amazing short story or novella. But as a novel, it doesn't achieve much. It is just under 200 pages long but feels much longer than that.

A porn queen is making a movie, wanting to break the world record by sleeping with 600 different men. The novel is told from the point of view of the waiting men; you have the ex television star who's looking for a different kind of comeback, the old porn king who's doing this as a favor to the queen, and a young man who's positive that Cassie, the Porn Queen, is his mother. You also meet Sheila, the young assistant who tries to make sure that everything goes as scheduled.

And that's that. The story is repetitive (the same things being mentioned time and time again - how many times do we need to hear that this or that guy is eating chips at the food table???) and the characters are paper-thin. From the very first few pages, you know exactly where this story is going. It holds no surprises, nothing to make us want to turn the next page to see what happens. In one word, the whole thing is just blah.

No, I wasn't turned off my the context. As a matter of fact, some of it was interesting. You can see that the author did his research and found some great factoids about the industry. But fun facts aren't enough to save a story. Honestly, I was bored while reading Snuff. With a title and premise like this one, it should have been at least remotely entertaining. But in the end, all I could think was, been there, done that.

Snuff is mediocre. Worth reading if you're a Palahniuk fan, but wait to buy it in paperback. As usual, Chuck shows us the disgusting mess on the bottom of our shoe, in graphic detail. He doesn't hesitate to show us how attached to the meaningless details of life we become. The story was good, and there were a few small twists. I came away looking at the porn industry, relationships, and sex in a new light.
Nothing here hasn't been said before, however. It's kind of "more of the same" from Palahniuk. I'm happy, but in a disappointed way.

After reading the synopsis, boring was the last thing I expected this book to be. I picked it up at the airport because it sounded interesting.
The plot twist that Mr. Palahniuk I've heard is known for, probably sounded really good when he first thought them up, but they just didn't deliver. I think it could have been much better.
Also, this book was tough to read. Conversations between characters could be in quotes in one sentence, then the next sentence, the converstion was in the character's first person's thoughts, in their "uneducated" english. I'm sure the author did this on purpose however I didn't enjoy it.
The first 10-20 euphamisms for male masturbation was funny, then it stopped being funny, just became repetitive and boring, and the same was true of the porn movie names.
I did find some of the hollywood trivia scattered thoughout the book interesting.

Im what you might call a rabid Chuck Palahniuk fan: Ive read everything he has written and reccommended his work to all of my friends. So on the day that "Snuff" came out, naturally I had to buy it and read it all in one sitting.

And as a rabid fan, I found it to be just okay. The concept of the story in and of itself is great, and the little side notes and tips that the characters drop along the way are neat too. The biggest problem was that none of the characters were... gripping. In all of his other books, no matter how messed up and sick the characters were, you felt like you KNEW them, you loved them. In this one the characters just didn't seem to pop as much. They weren't hateable, but certainly not as memorable as, say, Rant.

The other problem that I had with this book was that the ending was a little bit too predictable. Now, in all of his other books, Palahniuk leads you to the end in such a way that you put it all together a page before its revealed. It dawns on you just in time to end with a big "AH! AH HAH!" In "Snuff", you kinda saw it coming from a mile away. It could be that Palahniuk wanted you to know right away, but it felt sorta predictable.

All in all, it was a decent book. If you're a hardcore fan you will probably hate it, but if this is one of the first of his that you're reading, you will probably enjoy it. For a really great read, go for "Rant" instead.

If like myself YOU raced through 'Rant', hated 'Haunted' didn't like 'Diary' and were lulled to sleep by 'Lullaby' then you'll be glad to know that Chuck Palahniuk's best work didn't stop after 'Choke' in 2001. Here in his 9th novelistic effort he turns the porn industry on it's head and satirically skewers it in the way that only he can. With a story about a 600-man strong gangbang of a washed up porn star you'd probably be thinking "low grade porn", but you'd be wrong. What you get here is anything but titillating. In fact like most of his work you see only the seamiest, nastiest and most extreme sides of a very dirty industry. This is a quick and breezy read that has a lot in common with a bad accident at the side of the road. You know you shouldn't and don't really want to look, but you just can't help yourself.... As always with Palahniuk though the laughs come at you out of nowhere like a left hook.

I enjoyed this book, with its many doses of weird Hollywood trivia, bizarre twists and contemptible characters. It's not as bleakly profound as Fight Club, as gorily insane as Haunted, or as deliciously sick as Pygmy, but it is an entertaining maze of bad taste laid out on a bedrock of precision-hammered prose, which is what you expect from Palahniuk.

This is definitely the most outrageous and hilarious Chuck book to date. He pushes the envelope in this novel dripping with sexual depravity. I read this book in the privacy of my own home, slightly embarrassed to be caught reading something so lewd in public. But I enjoyed every minute of it.

Cassie Wright has set out to break a porn world record by filming herself with 600 men during the course of one shoot. However, we learn there is more to this scheme than just a record as the novel unfolds. While the reader doesn't see much action on the set, a majority of the book takes place in the waiting room where 600 men prowl while waiting for their moment on camera. The story is told from four perspectives: Number 72, who thinks Cassie is his birth mother; Number 37, a washed up television star; Number 600, an aging porn king; and Sheila, Cassie's droll but ambitious assistant. There are the obligatory Viagra jokes, requisite porn film titles peppered throughout, and mandatory industry secrets. I don't even want to know where Chuck gets some of his ideas, especially when it comes to the final scene. But the ending's shocking twist delivers exactly what Chuck fans expect.

Chuck Palahniuk is one of my favourite authors. Snuff is not one of his greatest books however. It takes place in a porn movie studio with allegedly 600 men queuing up to have sex with the best porn queen ever. It becomes clear that the porn queen, Cassie Wright, is doomed - allegedly. The men in the queue tell their stories and these are hilarious! It isn't Terry Southern's "Blue Movie" and it is probably anti-erotic. Read it and be amused!

This is a good book! Short and sweet, with amazing characters, great stories and the usual Palahniuk twist and turns.

As far as Chuck Palahniuk goes, I've seen "Fight Club" on DVD and loved it, but I have only read one other book of his, "Haunted"!

Other reviewers claim they saw the ending coming a mile away, really?, perhaps they didnt finish the book then, at several points in book, I thought the same thing, I thought I knew what the surprise ending would be too and I was wrong every time. When I did get to the end, I thought it was hilarious and my guesses were way off.

Three men are waiting for their turn to be with Cassie Wright (porn star) they are Mr. 72, Mr. 137 and Mr. 600. Cassie is trying to break the record for a gang bang. Another character in the book is Sheila, Cassie's assistant, she provides several chapters. The book is broken down into very short chapters, each chapter a different character is talking, much like in "Haunted", for those of you that have read it.

Good funny, dirty book!

Read it for a good laugh or to just peak into the world of Chuck Palahniuk's mind!

I've read three Palahniuk books so far(Survivor, Fight Club, and Choke) voraciously in a single sitting each time. So when I came across this one at the library, I thought I was in for an interesting afternoon. Boy, what a disappointment. The one dimensional characters, the story beats you can see coming a mile off. Nothing that pulls you in. I stopped reading it at about page 70, and I usually don't put down a book. Just the overemphasis on the disgustingly physical (the snack food filth, the assistant's sweaty gloves, the autograph dog), which I had no problem with in "Choke", rubbed me wrong. The final nail in the coffin for me was all the "clever" porn movie titles that are twists on real movie titles. Obviously these stem from vague memories of Chuck's of titles like "Little Orphan Fanny" or something. But really, this device get annoying quickly and leaves a real sense of Chuck's complete ignorance of the porn industry. Practically no porn "spoofs" get made nowadays. Hell, most porn releases now aren't even really "movies" but 4 hour compilation discs. This ignorance combined with the paper-thin characters was enough for me to just put it down without a second thought.
I expected more out of you, Mr. Palahniuk....

But I found this book to be very entertaining. I really enjoyed the way the story was told from multiple viewpoints of people at the same event with very different motives. Not 100% sold on the ending of the book, but that didn't detract from how much I liked the book overall.

This wasn't my favorite Palahniuk book. It is still worth reading for a fan of his writing, but don't expect to be blown away like you were with some of the others (My favorites so far are Fight Club, Rant, and Choke. )

It's definitely worth a shot and the book jacket design by Rodrigo Corrall is INCREDIBLE!!!! That's the main reason I picked it up in the first place

As if Haunted wasn't already boring enough this book was barely readable. It's like this author just smokes dust and writes random stories that don't even make sense. It's like human centipede 3, you were make to anticipate this amazing story and instead you get shock value which for anyone like me wasn't even shocking. Just detail after detail of basically old porn stars. There's better documentaries on Netflix that won't waste your time.

This novel was definitely disappointing. As many other reviewers have said, it is certainly not Palahniuk's best work, or even especially good work. I generally like Palahniuk a lot and I thought, upon reading the description of the book, that he would really be able to bring this plot to life and make for an enjoyable, interesting read. Unfortunately, he didn't do that here. The characters are flat, the "plot twists" are obvious a mile away, and it just didn't hold my interest the way his writing usually does.

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. But I enjoyed the read. True fact.

If you were looking for something deep and meaningful this isn't it. If you have a plane ride to fill and want a good laugh you're in the right place. The book is well written and fun to read without making your brain work to hard to understand what's happening. If you haven't read Chuck's work before this isn't the place to start. while it is a good book it is no where as good as his other works. If you are already a fan then don't judge to harshly, we know it could be better but that doesn't mean it isn't good.

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. Dark, funny, gross, and a definite assault on American sexuality. Worth a read.

Snuff

I've read Fight Club, Survivor, Choke, and Lullaby. The first 3 were 4-5 stars, while Lullaby was 3-4 stars.

Snuff starts off with a unique premise and largely untouched and taboo subject: hard core pornography. As in previous works, he uses the same ingredients of taboo/disgusting imagery, bursts of roiling humor, a fatalistic-nihilistic viewpoint of the human condition, and insertion of random facts (which seems more and more to impress the reader on how well he has done his research).

This time, Chuck, it just doesn't work...

An Onion news article headline from the archive reads: "Marilyn Manson Now Going Door-To-Door Trying To Shock People." Substitute Chuck Palahniuk's name and that sentiment probes more deeply into the author behind SNUFF than this "novel" ever does.

Chuck Palahniuk has a new punchline to share. Or aptly, in the case of SNUFF, a money shot. Viscera, the macabre, and white-knuckling, ankle-breaking over-the-topness are its default settings.

His latest punchline, as always, is designed to Shock!(tm). But in reality it amounts to a button that doesn't need much pushing in order to gain a response that doesn't require much wit or courage to elicit. It's a sweaty, overcooked, Captain Obvious overture to the cheap seats.

To get his hoary money shot, Palahniuk reverse-engineers another shaggy dog tale to lead us to it (which, at 197 pages, isn't that shaggy a dog, or very much of a tale, at all).

As Palahniuk labors to make his point (banging against the narrative's sides along the way), he packs it with phylo-dough characterizations, recites scads of Googling research, jams in a reversal or two, channels M. Night Shyamalan's ZINGER!(tm) mojo, then sticks his limp tail on the wheezing donkey with an anti-climatic "gotcha!"

Finally, he slaps on a provocative, monosyllabic title bound to titillate someone, somewhere. And then he goes door-to-door (or on the store) to peddle the it. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Two books ago HAUNTED charted over 400 pages. His last book, RANT, cleared 300. SNUFF can't even muster 200; it disconnects at 197 and with a multi-tiered denoument it could have been even brisker. At this rate Palahniuk's next offering will be a visceral, button-pushing reduction in haiku- or fortune cookie riddle form that Doubleday hardcovers for $24.95.

SNUFF is (ostensibly) about porn. But there's precious little "there" there that someone's conception of porn hasn't already assumed as truth. SNUFF's structure is a lot like the imagined & stereotypical porn star: a obscenely caricatured thong-flossed shape; piercings in dark places & taboo tattoos in visible ones; sculpted with man-made materials like silicone, hair dye, and bronzer; spackled with makeup to mask a weak, awkward face and brittle bones, with no sparkle, heart, or soul behind dead doll eyes.

SNUFF, like most of Palahniuk's work, is a wonky Rube Goldbergian delivery system that tunnelvisions to a Shock!(tm) ending. Characters and situations in SNUFF are contrived to within an inch of their lives. It's all checkers on a board moved out of the way, his blueprint for the sake of Shock!(tm) reading like Sherman's March through the story.

Because of the hamhock fisting, there's a choppy, uneven rhythm and overlapping repetition as if the editor overcut every other page, and each character makes a running start with the last chapter before gaining new ground on their own.

The story is told from four different first-person POV's - three men and one woman - but their voices sound the same. All are interchangeable bundles of surface noise, tics, quirks and manic wackness. All are spiritless underneath. Emperor, meet your new clothes. Curtain, pay no attention to the wizard hunched behind you.

This choice of first person is terrible, since it means we're stuck wearing Palahniuk's sandwich board agenda. Everyone's a cipher for his slang (FYI, not everyone refers to their index or pointer finger as a "gun finger"). Everyone's chronically reciting obsessive/compulsive data points like they're living Google search engines looking up Palahnuik's keywords.

Anyone can parrot back party game lists ("euphemisms for male masturbation"), or riff on funny porno titles based on Hollywood movies. This isn't characterization, and it isn't even that interesting research after the first dozen instances.

(And to say that since they are all drawn this way on purpose to emphasize that they are in an amoral, heartless, and soulless circle of hell is a crutchy and narcissistic copout- like Bill Shatner's girdle-wearing in Star Trek).

The biggest tragedy is that the most interesting character - the one whose head I most wanted to be inside, the one I could forgive if she sounded the most like Chuck Palahniuk - is the pornstar punchline herself, Candy Wright, who spends the majority of the narrative in the other room and filtered through the other characters like a game of Telephone.

The irony is that Palahniuk should BE a screenwriter. I still think his best novel is the film version of FIGHT CLUB. SNUFF reads like it's in the wrong format, or that it's a treatment for his screenplay. It probably is. A lot of this book's problems could have been solved if it becomes a movie. I'd likely I'd fast-forward it on my DVD player instead of skimming its pages because it would take less time.

I started(and finished) this book today hoping that it would be as interesting and intriguing as his other books( so far I've read Choke,Fight Club,Invisible Monsters and Haunted). This is by far the worst Chuck Palahniuk. It is very dull and has a weak storyline. You will surely,just like I did, find it boring and a waste of time. If you have not read Choke or Haunted, please do,because they are much better than Snuff. If you are indeed a Chuck Palahniuk fan,you will NOT like this book at all. After reading it, you don't get the same feeling you get when you read his other work. Save your money,buy a better book.

Snuff is Chuck without purpose. It stirs no thought-provoking ideas in its audience, its characters are bland and one dimensional, and it leaves you feeling wasteful and cheated. The only thing it has going for it is its level of entertainment and its occasional slivers of insight into the porn industry.

So, if you're a Chuck fan, just go ahead and get Snuff over with so you can say you've read it. It's fairly short and should only take you a day or two to knock out. If you're not a die-hard fan of Pahlaniuk, you'd be better off reading Fight Club or Survivor or Invisible Monsters.

Although this book has a really good ending twist that only Palahniuk can write,the rest of the book doesn't deliver the impact of the title or premise. For a novel about a world record pornography event, it has very little sex and very little excitement. It has a fast pace but only because you are hoping the next pages will delivery some of what you are wishing for.

Unless you are a die-hard Palahnuik fan I would pass on this novel.

I was surprised to see the mixed negative reviews about this book. This happened to be the first Palahniuk book I read and I haven't been able to stop since. Sure I like some of his other books better but that doesn't mean I don't think this is a really good book.

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.

Like everyone who read this, I love Chuck, but this novel just wasn't that great. First off, it should have been a short story, because nothing happened. It reminded me of that movie "Lady in the Water" in the fact they both did very little and could have been told is less time.
What made the Beatles great is they evolved, and it seems to me that his writing is more of the same. Maybe I am outgrowing all the anger/cynism, but I expect more. The trivia is great but it starting to seem rundant and forced, like he has the trivia and writes the story around it.
Worth your time only in the fact you can read it quickly.

I have to confess to my initial trepidation when approaching this book. Despite being a fan of the author, I was convinced there would be moments which would not sit well with me. Moments I'd be embarrassed by, irked by. Reading about a 600 person gang bang wouldn't normally be the type of thing I'd go for. And yet, this is a fantastic book. In spite of my wariness, it was engaging, highly relevant and ultimately very satisfying. Every chapter, every scene and virtually every sentence was vital and propelled me towards its "climax". This momentum did make the book seem short but the quality of the experience far outweighed any criticism over quantity.

My only negative is that, due to its subject matter, recommending this to friends and family ain't going to be easy. That said, it's my favourite novel of 2008.

I was really not impressed with this one, unfortunately. Each turn was oh so predictable and far too much effort was spent trying to be crass and outrageous. If you ask me, Palahniuk's heart is just not in it anymore. I think he needs to get back to basics and put a little more time and effort into his books instead of just churning out book after book of production line shock value.

If the book had substance/superior writing/superior character development like some of his earlier books (e.g., Invisible Monsters, Choke, Fight Club), he wouldn't need to fill it with such tritely contrived shock. But than, with a name like "Snuff", I suppose I shouldn't have expected anything more...

I remember once seeing a review for one of Palahniuk's earlier novels which said something like "He makes nihilsm fun!"

And so he did, once, but now we're beginning to understand just what happens to this "wise" nihilist in the end; this know-it-all who always had a "smart," "shocking," or "in-your-face" comment for the rest of us poor delusional slaves. One day the trivia runs out, the in-your-face commentary isn't shocking or new anymore, and the "surprise endings" don't surprise anyone. Most of us have started to wonder why we ever thought the cheap, gratuitous gore and filth was all that entertaining to begin with. We start to think that whatever "shock value" his earlier work had was just a cheap trick that we're ashamed we fell for. And Palahniuk, the Great Nihilist, is finally revealed for the fraud he always was. He's performed his little trick too many times, and his audience sees that it - and he - have become utterly irrelevant.

All that to say, don't buy this worthless piece of garbage. We could attempt to explain the non-existent plot, or talk about the contrived and transparent attempts at characters, and even give away the "surprise" ending (which, I assure you, will not surprise you), but frankly, it would be a waste of time. There's nothing here to analyze; even tearing it to pieces would be tossing pearls to swine. Suffice to say, if you're one of the simpletons who is impressed by shallow shock-value that everyone else finds transparent or just juvenile and repulsive, like 8th-grade attempts at sex jokes, you might enjoy this book. Otherwise, you'll be wasting money on something that is guaranteed to disappoint you, and the realization that this author isn't (and never really was) all that talented after all may cheapen your enjoyment or pleasant memories of some of his other work.