Book cover of “Snuff” by Chuck Palahniuk. Image © Doubleday

Having been a long-time fan of Chuck Palahniuk through “Lullaby,” “Invisible Monsters,” “Survivor” and “Choke” it was with utter dismay that the novels that proceeded them “Diary” and “Haunted” just left me cold. Had the progenitor of the ground-breaking film “Fight Club” lost his magic touch? Had he (like surrealist Will Self before him) fallen too deeply into self-caricature and personal excess that his literary message had become carpet bombed by affected style and tacky swimming pool disembowellings?

Anyone who still thinks this way has yet to read “Snuff,” Palahniuk's latest novel.

Cassie Wright is a porn queen who has starred in such ironically-titled films as “Slut on a Hot Tin Roof,” “Chitty Chitty Gang Bang,” “The Twilight Bone” and on and on, her rancid career like the shameful silhouette of an estranged uncle. In one last act of career suicide, Cassie Wright finds herself at the thick end of a six-hundred man gang-bang called “World Whore Three,” in recognition of the two films that made her famous.

Confided in the stinking basement on the day of the shoot, six hundred sweating, shaving, tattooed, buffet-munching masturbators, semi-erect in honour of their teen idol duplicated in multiple monitors on high. A sweltering basement, the concrete floor covered in corn chips and body hair, the only sink in the only toilet smeared with bronzer, is the right and only place for such Freudian shenanigans. Palahniuk has gathered together some of the most bitter and twisted characters from porno's jaded psuedo-history into this Rant-like oral narrative of expectation and (ultimate) disappointment.

The story oscillates between the personal revelations of Cassie Wright and her erstwhile P.A. Sheila as they prepare for the extravaganza and three of the six hundred gang-bangers, wilting-bouquet-clutching Mr 72 (Cassie Wright's love child), constantly-Viagra-popping Mr 137 (a failed TV star), fake-tan-slathered Mr 600 (the father of Cassie Wright's love child). But it's not a simple tail of a load of blokes fucking a porn heroine to death. “Snuff” was often-times more laugh-out-loud funny than “Choke”—did someone say Kegel Exercise Stones?

I was totally convinced by his “factoids,” as they're called—I love the one about “Wizard of Oz” dog Toto having his back broken by the Munchkin who caught him.

“Snuff” finally shows the maturing of Palahniuk's factual-anecdote-over-driving-storyline narrative style, it has assured his place in the How To Write Adult Soap hall of fame and in the future, all prime-time T.V. will look this way. It's really about being proud of who you are but it takes its own sweet (painful) time in getting there, truly tooth-grindingly painful.

My suspicion is that Palahniuk has found his literary second win—“Rant” is on my list of books to read in coming weeks.