Snuff

... it might not be in the top 10 of his works. Better than "Haunted" but not near as good as "Rant." I have read every Chuck novel and will read everyone he puts out. Fight Club, Choke, and Survivor and my favorites. If you haven't read those novels yet, then read them first. If you still need more Chuck after those, then give this one a try.

Sparing you the summary the product description and myriad reviews offer, Snuff comes across as a desperate attempt to sell mind-numbing filth to a target audience of teenagers whose parents are fooled by the idea that Palahniuk's written literature is at all comparable to the censored version of Fight Club that airs on USA.

When I read Snuff, I imagined I was sixteen and discovering my own perversion of existentialism for the first time. This book is a gift you give to your child when he graduates from watching professional wrestling into the pseudo-intellectualism which punctuates the society of young people who won't read geeky fantasy novels.

This book will appeal to you if you don't read enough to know a cliché when you see one.

I read the plot and thought, wow, I should just not read it. It was a horrible idea for a book. But the more I got into it, the more Chuck amazed me, like he has in all his other books. What I liked was not the story, but the way he delivered it. He gives you facts that you would never have known without him. His wording is incredible and he shocked me more than once with his immagry.

The idea sounded intriguing and daring... but it falls flat. I read 3 chapters and got the gist. Returned it promptly. How I miss the days of "Fight Club" and "Invisible Monsters."

I had told myself I wouldn't read another Chuck Palahniuk book after I half-finished Invisible Monsters, which I thought was annoying, not because of the writing style, but because of the transitions from scenes. However, I couldn't resist the plot idea of his latest, Snuff: a novel surrounding the life of Cassie Wright, a porn star, as she tries to beat the world record for the biggest gang bang caught on tape. Through the 197 pages, we come across other characters as well, including Mr. 72, Mr. 137, Mr. 600, and a stage assistant known as Sheila, and it is through these characters that we learn about not only Cassie Wright, a wonderfully depicted and drawn character, but also the other narrating protagonists as well as they speak and observe not only their histories and shortcomings, but their surroundings as well. And it is through this method that Mr. Palahniuk thoroughly succeeds in making sympathetic, three dimensional characters who are not archetypes and stereotypes, but human. Plot-wise, Palahniuk engages the reader with cliff hanger ending chapters, as they stumble through his minimalist prose. I say stumble because it is something you'd have to work through; a stylistic feature before its time the likes of Hemingway or Burroughs; an acquired taste, yet something whole-heartedly revolutionary. However, the story falls short as it climaxes to what turns out to be a twist turned awry that can leave any reader asking the author: "You led me all this way for this?" The characters we meet, though, is worth the price of admission and perhaps giving this author a second chance as his fans wait for his next venture and formerly disgusted readers take another look at his previous works.