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So each chapter of Snuff is from a different character’s
POV and there are four characters: Numbers 72, 137, 600, and Sheila and it’s a
good thing each chapter is labeled whose POV it currently is so you can go back
and see who’s thinking because otherwise I couldn’t tell the difference. Well,
that’s not entirely true as a couple of them had verbal(mental?) ticks. Number 600
called everybody “dude”; kid dude, pizza delivery dude, dude 137, television
dude, dude 72, player dude, dude with the roses, ugly dago dude, ugly wop dude,
teddy-bear dude, dude, dudes, dude, and if you think that was annoying to read imagine several pages of it. Sheila
relates obscure tidbits of information and afterwards thinks, “True Fact” about
twice a page. If she’s not dishing out depressing (sometimes inaccurate)
historical factoids her boss Cassie Wright is. Or number 137 is. And they all
have their own sad and pathetic life story to tell with a side helping of daddy
issues. And in the cases of number 72 and Sheila, mommy issues.
So what
is this steaming pile about? An aging porn star by the name of Cassie Wright
wants to end her career with a bang by setting the all-time gang bang record of
600 men. (The internet claims that another woman already set the record at over
900 before this book came out but shh! Palahniuk has a gimmick to sell. I mean
tell. No, I mean sell.) Sheila, her assistant, is in charge of managing the “pud-pullers”.
(She has many more euphemisms for masturbation to insult all men, regardless of
occupation or status among the living, but I’ll spare you. Take it as read that
they could be confusing and distracting, and became obnoxious after the first
three pages.) The three men are part of the casting call. 137 lost his acting
career when it surfaced he had bottomed in a gay gang bang porno and hopes his
performance will convince people he’s really straight so he can be on TV again.
(God alone knows how he thinks participating in another gang bang, even if it
is heterosexual, will get him back on a mainstream show.) 600, another aging
porn star, worked with Cassie for many years and is also hoping to revive his
career. (Although he portrays things like he’s doing this as a favor to give
the production star appeal.) 72 was told by his adoptive parents that Cassie
was his biological mother and he’s here to “save” her. So they all stand around
reminiscing and interacting while they wait for their turn on the sheets,
giving Palahniuk enough time to create a lot of stupid porn titles. (The movie
they’re currently creating will be titled World
Whore Three. Creative, right?)
It
comes out that Cassie really did have a baby she gave up for adoption around
twenty years ago. Feeling guilty and like her life is a waste, she’s actually
planned this porno as a (not very) covert suicide. She expects to be fucked to
death and wants the proceeds of her life insurance policies and the income from
the movie to go to this abandoned child. Sheila muses how smart this all is
because the way they’ll cut the movie together the insurance investigators won’t
be able to tell which guy is fucking a live body and which is fucking a corpse.
That way they’ll be able to deny knowing at what point during the shoot she
died. (This would be a great plan if insurance companies were a) not stingy as
hell and b) composed of morons. Never mind the fact that it’s completely
illegal to profit from a crime and the way these four were yakking on CNN would
have the news the day after the thing was released. And forget internet sales.
You’d have to set up a ton of proxy sellers to avoid attracting attention and
anyway who would handle the transactions? Paypal? Credit card companies? Great
idea if you have many different accounts to funnel the money through and a way
to report it legitimately. And you better have a way to pay off, generously,
all the dozens of crew working the set so they don’t narc on you when the cash
starts rolling in. And if this all goes to the unknown child how are they going
to set this up to make a profit off the snuff video of their mom if it is
deemed illegal? Through their lawyer? That’s assuming you get the raw footage
back after the police have confiscated it for evidence during the investigation
into Wright’s death by sex act. But I digress. This point just really annoys me
it’s so stupid.)
I also
want to talk about the imagery in this book. It’s gross. He describes the room
these 600 naked, bronzed, sloppy men are waiting around in, one hand down their
shorts and the other in the chip bowl. How the one restroom is covered in human
waste and the floor of the waiting room is sticky with bronzer. Everything is
sweaty, oozing, soaked, and covered in junk food crumbs and saliva. There’s no
real purpose to this other than as an attempt to be shocking. I’m sure part of
this approach was to show the seediness of the sex industry but I’m sure that
could have been accomplished to better effect through the degradation of the
characters and how the industry has befouled each of their lives. They have all
hit rock bottom due to pornography in one way or another. A good writer could
easily do something with that rather than slop down the melodramatic horseshit
Palahniuk gave us instead. (137 participated in the gay porno as an attempt to
prove that he really is gay and not just confused like his daddy said. His
daddy says getting “diddled” as a child made him that way. “Oh yeah, son, I’m
sure it happened. I did it, after all.”)None of this tawdry, overwrought imagery
will stay with me, either. You want something disturbing that will pop into
your mind at random moments read Yasmina Khadra’s In the Name of God, a description of the rise of religious fanaticism
in a village in Algeria, or the indifference with which the main character of Fudoki by Kij Johnson kills women and
children during a night-time raid, or even the end of David Markson’s Vanishing Point which culminates in a
spiraling description of death and loss or anything by Arnaldur Indridason. The
description in this book can best be summed up with the word “cheap.”
Of
course this entire book is an attempt to be shocking, from the gang bang aspect
to the talk of blow-up dolls and dildos to 600 pondering about having sex with
a dying, comatose woman. The premise of this book is based on the gang bang
record set by Annabel Chong back in 1995 of 70 men and 251 sex acts in one 10
hour shoot. This, coupled with the fact that a woman can die from sex,
fascinated Palahniuk enough to set an entire story around it. The characters
are so contrived, and in the case of 600 disgusting, that most of the book is
an eye-rolling annoyance. The prose is horrible. I don’t care if it’s supposed
to “sound like how people talk”, I hate dialect writing. It was irritating in
Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and it’s
still irritating 150+ years later. The ending is stupid. I mean, really stupid.
There’s a “twist” but it’s not much of one and the whole mess dissolves into a
confused scene with cyanide, defibrillators, and unresolved plot threads. If
you’re running up to a particular climax, don’t suddenly make a left turn down
a side alley to stand giggling while your audience tries to figure out where
the hell you went.
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