My Review Of Chuck Palahniuk's Snuff

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.

Email of the Day

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Email of the Day

Dear Susannah,

My name is [redacted woman's name] and I am from Germany. Today I read your article referring to your Gangbang experience. I must admit that I was quite shocked as I tried to imagine the extend of that situation. How were your emotions on the scene? Did the woman made the impression that she was enjoying what was going on? Was it humilating? Primitive? You seem to be very open minded regarding sexuality--also porn and other business which envolves sexuality. But do you think that these absolutely extreme dimensions of sex are necessary? How far should it go?

I'm really interested in your answer because to me it is absolutely fascinating but also deterrent at once.

Yours [redacted woman's name]

Gangbang

I'm going to be reviewing Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, Snuff, for Radar Online, and I'm really looking forward to it. I've been interested in the book since word of it broke--oh, I don't know when, a year or so ago, maybe. For those of you who are not aware, it takes place on the set of a World's Biggest Gangbang movie of which an adult actress named Cassie Wright is the porn star looking to set a sexual world record. Apparently, and I can't imagine this is a spoiler given the title, she dies in the end. In any case, the publicist at Doubleday, the publisher, sent it to me in the mail yesterday, and I eagerly await it. I'm interested in Snuff because I was on the set of a World's Biggest Gangbang movie years ago. To be exact, it was "The World's Biggest Gang Bang III: The Houston 620." I'd moved to LA and started writing about the porn industry only about a year or so before, and this was the first time I'd experienced an event that I would refer to in my write up of it for Detour magazine as an "apocalyptic fuck." (That article also included the line: "The hole's name is Houston.") To say the experience was impactful would be a catastrophic understatement. In addition to writing about it, I was also covering it for a Playboy TV show that I was on at the time. Highlights of that experience included me saying to camera: "It smells like a sperm bank in here." Classy it wasn't. We, the crew and I, that is, were nervous going into it, but I'll never forget when we rounded the corner to the giant soundstage where it was taking place, and the line of men waiting to get inside snaked through the parking lot, and my jaw fell open, literally. We spent the next eleven hours in there, and I don't know that I emerged from that building the same. There were the ringers at the beginning. There was the Lazy Susan upon which Houston lay while the men descended upon her. There was the dorky Asian guy in glasses and a T-shirt and nothing else who freaked out because he wasn't getting his turn. There were the two middle-aged guys who looked like they were somebody's dad who double-teamed Houston and high-fived each other over her body. There was the plain and simple, undeniable fact that when Houston emerged for more after a break midway through, she had clearly been crying, but she did the rest of the guys anyway. There was the way the digital counter on the wall climbed higher and higher, even though there was no way there were 600 guys in there, although the number of men she had sex with that day was nothing to sneeze at. There was how it changed at a certain point, and it was like being in the jungle only the people were the animals. There was the guy with the Frankenpenis from the botched penile enlargement surgery. There was the moment I opened the bathroom door, hoping, I suppose, to get away from it all for a minute, and there was a guy in there filming two girls on the toilet. Today I would have to say that I can't say that I've been the same since. Only, that was a long time ago. And in the scope of everything that happened in terms of me and Porn Valley, that was only the beginning, really. So, I'm very interested to see how Palahniuk represents it. And find out what got Doubleday behind a gangbang snuff porn movie and compelled them to give its dead porn star her own Myspace page to promote it.