I have just finished reading Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk...A typical Palahniuk book with marginalised characters who react with self destructive and aggressive behaviour..What the author likes to call 'transgressive fiction. In a similar vein to Bret Easton Ellis of American Psycho fame.The storyline...Cassie Wright lies on a bed in front of a camera, waiting to have sex with 600 men. Consecutively. In one day. It is going to be sold as "the biggest gang-bang in history" – and Cassie wants it to end with her death, live on camera. Among the Viagra-guzzling men queuing excitedly at the door, there is one who first introduced her to porn – by drugging and raping her. Oh, and a boy who fervently believes he is the son she gave up for adoption 19 years ago.
The book questions...A queue of 600 men waiting to screw a Barbie-woman to death seems a bleak meta-phor for porn. If you knew getting your quick orgasm would harm a woman, would you carry on? In Palahniuk's vision, they do, with barely a disinterested shrug.
Cassie's "son", waiting in the queue, seems like another metaphor still. He's a "porn baby", conceived on camera, thrown away like a used condom. He discovered who his mother was when his adopted parents caught him masturbating over her image and howled "That's your birth-mother!" He carried around sex-toys modelled on her breast and vagina like "religious totems of the mother [he'll] spend the rest of [his life] trying to find." The first generation of porn babies, who have grown up with the most extreme porn on their bedroom screens, are now teenagers. Palahniuk forces us to peer at them, and to ask what this industry is doing to us, and its "performers".
Overall..the book is a good if not fantastic read. If you like Chuck's style of writing you won't be disappointed! The book is full of crazy factoids and debauchery and is very funny in parts..I love the use of film titles such as Chitty Chitty Gang Bang, Wizard of Ass, The Twilight Bone 6/10 :-Dx
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