My review of Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, Snuff, is up at Radar.
"If Rick Moody, according to Dale Peck, is the worst writer of his generation, Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Snuff (out today), may be the worst novel of this century."
Suffice to say, I didn't like it.
I got the book the other day, and I have to say there is something about it that fascinates me. It's this book published by this big publisher, Doubleday, which is part of Random House, and the book looks like a sex doll if a sex doll were a book. I suppose if you cut a hole out of the middle of it, you could fuck it. The inside of the cover is decorated with tiny silhouettes of a couple screwing in all kinds of positions. There's a reverse cowgirl on there somewhere.
Review copies come with press releases, and this one in big shouty letters explained the book in mathematical terms: "Palahniuk + porn = brilliant satire." The equation, though, falls short, because, as I stated in my review, Palahniuk's novel never rises about the porn it claims to satire. Instead, the author pens another fragment-filled slop-fest of faux sentiments strung together with info cribbed from Wikipedia and an idiot's understanding of the porn industry born out of watching too many porn movies.
Snuff was of special interest to me because, as I've stated here previously, I was on the set of a gang bang movie, specifically: "The World's Biggest Gang Bang III: The Houston 620." And it's clear upon reading the book that it's this very movie that Palahniuk used as his primary source.
One of the three main male characters who tells the story is Mr. 72, a young man who's under the impression that he's the given up at birth son of the gang bangee Cassie Wright. He's come to the gang bang to meet his mother, you see. And he's come bearing a bouquet of flowers for her.
I had forgotten until I read that bit that at the real gang bang, "The Houston 620," there was just such a person. I interviewed him. He was young, and small, and he had brought flowers for Houston. In medias res gang bang, he presented them to her. Everyone cooed. Then he had sex with her. As I recall, he stuck the tip of his tongue out a bit as he did so, like a kid tackling a particularly difficult problem in math class. The whole thing was as riveting as it was sad.
So, I'd venture to guess Houston is the real Cassie Wright, Mr. 72 was that kid, and the opening scene about eating at a buffet at a gangbang was probably yanked from this scene from Evan Wright's "Scenes from My Life in Porn." In the long list of gang bang movies Palahniuk lists near the start of the book, it's the Houston vehicle that remains unmentioned, which I find to be, uh, interesting. I suppose he watched the movie.
I guess he thought that was enough.
