Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Snuff
Book Review: Fresh out of meaningful insights
Summary: 2 Stars
At the heart of some of Chuck's better work is some insight into ourselves a la 'fight club'. You get into the stories. They entertain. You think he's a great guy for writing the way he does, so real and immediate. Then you close the back cover, reflect on the story and what happened to the protagonist and you have some thoughts about the way you live your life. You want to find a mission, you want to find meaning.
This book, unfortunately, is not up to the task of being thought provoking. It's cotton candy for the brain, without the usual substance and depth of cotton candy. It's a Jerry Lewis movie, minus the lovableness of the character. It's a Will Farrell movie without....well, it's just a Will Farrell movie. It's an Eddie Murphy movie with hours of folks sitting around the dinner table farting, and then the credits roll.
Do yourself a favor, skip this tripe and read 'fight club' again.
Book Review: From a Huge Fan to you, potential reader: This is really, really bad.
Summary: 1 Stars
I am a huge fan of Chuck Palahniuk's work, let me be clear. I think you know where this is going...Snuff is not just a simple disappointment in a catalog of amazing work, but a complete disaster that spurred me to file only my second review on Amazon (which will soon be remedied as titles including Invisible Monsters and Survivor are pure magic).
I thought I might have unrealistic expectations when I flipped to the back to see this clock in at 208 pages, but the brevity of the work actually turned out to be a relief. While it angered me to pay more than $0.12 a page, I would have considered it a deal at twice the price if I could erase this mess from the innards of my cranium. Snuff's plot 'twists' are lazy and telegraphed well in advance, and each page is crammed with tired porno-puns that would have been less groan-inducing by just adding 'in bed' to a random film title.
And honestly, that's about it...not a whole lot else going on with Snuff. Shame if this is your first entry point to Palahniuk's magical back catalog, and for long-time readers it hopefully won't be your last. I will keep reading, but take a pass on Snuff.
Book Review: Grand Guignol meets Google.
Summary: 2 Stars
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 Amazon) 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.
Book Review: Great Book (as expected)
Summary: 5 Stars
Excellent, well written novel by one of the greatest modern authors of today. Not for the squeamish, but if you're a fan of Chuck Palahniuk's previous novels, you should love this one.Book Review: Great Premise: Horrible Delivery
Summary: 2 Stars
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...