During the filming she hopes she will die-from a vaginal embolism (I'll spare you the explanation)-making the film a guaranteed blockbuster the revenue of which will go to the child she long ago gave up for adoption (the result of a 'wasted' money shot). She plans to cap her career with the ultimate slumber party-600 men on camera-thus breaking the world record for serial fornication in World Whore Three: The Whore to End All Whores.

The novel concerns Cassie Wright, an aging porn star who has been ridden hard and put away wet, as my grandfather used to say. Never has this been more evident than in Snuff. But I often can't help but feel he needs to slow down and force his work into deeper waters. I'm glad he's out there, shaking things up, pissing people off, making the grim-faced rheumy-eyed literary moles nervously chew their fingernails. And I can't help but marvel at how he has become a prophet to so many teens and twenty-somethings, speaking their language with his constant allusions to pop culture, his fuck-the-establishment sensibility, his rapid-fire paragraphing like a stream of text messages from a pimply English major hopped up on a diet of Adderall and Mountain Dew. There is such manic energy to his writing-such switchblade precision to the way he turns a sentence. Invisible Monsters and Choke are well worth your dollar.

Fight Club is an important, ballsy novel. It's called Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel, Snuff (Doubleday, $24.95).īy no means am I a Palahniuk-hater. What's grosser than that? When one of the rings belongs to her brother.īack then, there was no such thing as too far, too much. What's grosser than gross? When the head cheerleader does the splits and five class rings fall out. Remember those moments in middle school-smoking cigarettes behind the dumpster drinking Gatorade after football practice stealing baseball cards from K-Mart-when you told nasty jokes with a wicked smile and a punch to the shoulder?

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk