Snuff - By Chuck Palahniuk

I was privileged to get hold of an advanced readers copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s new book, Snuff. I will preface this review by saying that I am an avid Chuck fan. I have read all of his previous work, and I can be found regularly hounding the pages of The Cult, an excellent site. His writing has influenced me almost too much, but I have enjoyed using all of the tips, tricks, and lessons that he gives.

Also, I am going to judiciously avoid giving out any spoilers. I don’t want to give away anything to ruin the experience of reading Snuff, especially since we still have months till the novel comes out. So I will start with a brief summary that most of you already know:

“Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must-have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic.”

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?

The first thing that struck me about this novel was how dirty it was. Not Porn-dirty, because I was expecting that, but grimey/disgusting dirty. The novel opens on a description of the green room where these 600 guys are hanging out, waiting their turn. Now, a large room with 600 sweaty naked guys is going to be disgusting, and Chuck doesn’t pull any punches when describing everything from the craft-service table to the one lone bathroom to questionable tanning methods. He is definitely at home with the “unpacking” method we know so well from his other books.

In fact, from there on the whole novel feels like how-to examples of Chuck’s writing exercises. (These essays can be found at The Cult) From the unpacked descriptions, to the chorus, to the endless spewing of facts. He even has his characters “keep time” in interesting ways: number of scenes in a porno, number of dandruff flakes picked up and discarded, etc. It is all familiar territory. Familiar, but oh so invigorating.

After the scene is set and the mood is drawn (sweaty, impatient, claustrophobic), we get to learn about the four main characters, how they came there and what it means to them. Through those characters we also get a good portrait of Cassie Wright. There is Mr. 600, the veteran porn actor, who has done many films with Cassie in the past. Then, there is the young Mr. 72, a guy who is obsessed with Cassie Wright to a (un)natural degree. Mr. 137 rounds out the men, an ex-TV star who is at the end of his career, trying to get some valuable face time.

The narrators are rounded out by Sheila, Ms. Wright’s personal assistant and pud-pumper wrangler. Her chapters give Chuck about a billion chances to come up with different synonyms for “pud-pumper”. Including “ham-whammer”, “monkey-milker” and “ceiling-spackler”. She also gets to tell many true(?) behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories of pain, death, grooming, and the pain involved with being good at your craft. These facts are extremely entertaining and fit well with the style of the story.

As well as being full of interesting facts, this novel is also very funny. The porn industry in the book is like an over-the-top version of real-life. Every porn film that is mentioned seems to be a rip-off of a legitimate film, and each scene in the porno is a innovative re-imagining of the equivalent movie scene. From A Handmaid’s Tale to The Bridges of Madison County, nothing is safe. One of my favorites is from The Miracle Sex Worker:

Cassie Wright takes the hand of a deaf and blind actor. She folds his fingers into a pattern and presses his hand into her crotch, saying, “Water…”

One of the funniest scenes in the book is a scene I heard Chuck describe somewhere. In a video interview, or text interview, or somewhere else. It was from his first unpublished novel, and it involves a blow-up doll. If anyone knows where I heard this quote from, please let me know. I’ll just say for now that I was glad to see this scene found a home in Snuff. It was great when I first heard it described, and it was great to finally have read it. It had me laughing out loud.

The book is short, the ARC I have is 197 pages, but it is chock-full of this sort of humor, and even more full of interesting facts and stories. But that is not why we read a Chuck Palahniuk book, right? That is just the icing on the cake. We read them because they take something real, an emotion, an idea, a theme, and throws it in our face. Making us see the ugly side of life that is always hiding below the surface. The side where 600 men will line up to bang a women they don’t know for a few minutes, and then hope that at the end she dies just so they can become famous.

Snuff does just that. It shows us the ugly side, but slowly brings out something more. What I really got out of reading it was the search for belonging. For family. The green-room of the world’s biggest gang-bang, with death and fame on everyone’s mind, is not the setting I would expect to find a story about family. But that is what I got. At the end, after a climax no one can see coming, the point of the story really became focused. And after reading the last sentence I was struck by the layer of beauty behind this ugly, ugly story.