Description:

In the crowded greenroom of a porn-movie production, hundreds of men mill around in their boxers, awaiting their turn with the legendary Cassie Wright. An aging adult film star, Cassie Wright intends to cap her career by breaking the world record for serial fornication by having sex with 600 men on camera—one of whom may want to kill her. Told from the perspectives of Mr. 72, Mr. 137, Mr. 600, and Sheila, the talent wrangler who must keep it all under control, Snuff is a dark, wild, and lethally funny novel that brings the presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction.

**

From Publishers Weekly

Palahniuk delivers another entertaining and cynical social commentary on American materialism and gluttony. In her final pornographic performance, Cassie Wright has decided to be on the receiving end of a 600-man gangbang. Neither Cassie nor the men waiting for their chance with her expect her to survive. But some of the men have very different ideas about what this encounter will mean for them in their personal and professional lives. Todd McLaren does an excellent job voicing the many different first-person accounts. Whether reading the accounts of Cassie's assistant, an aging stud or the Cassie's presumptive abandoned son, McLaren finds a complementary voice for each and keeps them consistent throughout. Given the raunchy discussions of sex and the sinister elements that are often associated with the porn industry, McLaren's gritty voice adds the needed edge to this seedy but interesting novel. A Doubleday hardcover (Reviews, Feb. 11). (May)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

Palahniuk has followed his tendency towards sensationalism to its logical conclusion and written a novel about a pornographic film, to mixed reactions. Naysayers wrote that Snuff either failed in its satirical role or, worse, Palahniuk has simply run out of ideas and only wants to make readers cringe. Yet other reviewers felt that, as in previous novels, Palahniuk’s strong, character-driven explorations of the unseemly actually reveal a great deal about our society. Certainly, he riffs cleverly on Cassie’s cinematic history (“Gropes of Wrath,” for example). But Palahniuk’s play on movies and literature in the context of this novel perhaps points to an important question raised by the New York Times Book Review: “What the hell is going on? The country that produced Melville, Twain and James now venerates King, Crichton, Grisham, Sebold and Palahniuk.”
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.