Snuff Memories

by David Roden

"It is enough to glance at the footnotes - from masters of body horror like Cronenberg, Ballard and Barker to post-structuralist philosophers of the self like Derrida, Nancy and Deleuze - to grasp the intention of Snuff Memories. Unveiling like a tableau of ancient gods and deathly orgies, where “the universe is composed out of windowless monads each locked away and screaming,” this evocative novel is better called a theoretical installation. Each fragment documenting an erotic way to lose one’s humanity, this is a collection of nightmarish yet utopian miniature visions of sex, death, transformation, and pain, where human bodies are stretched beyond their capacity into mythical realms. Brutal and evocative, at once a prose poem and a theory of the limit, Snuff Memories creates a mythology of enticing and deadly encounters with mutants, matriarchs, and goddesses, documenting a multitude of ways in which one can be erotically and philosophically disemboweled."

– Bogna M. Konior, Research Fellow, NYU Shanghai, Interactive Media Arts department & AI and Culture Research Centre

"Snuff Memories is Sadean. Not because of its commitment to detailing the minutiae of posthuman pornographic excess (although that is certainly an important part of the work) but because of its obsession with permutation. Everything is erected, demolished, decentred, and respooled, before being forced out to the limits once again. Bodies effervesce in fatal conjugations, topologies deform, fuzz out and remerge everted, like bad DOOM skins, covered in blood. The posthuman cannot be known before it is produced—so to know it, we must produce it. And until we really are swept up in these disorienting forces—merciless, murderous, erotic perhaps—we have literature. Snuff Memories is a book for anyone who ever secretly wanted to get dommed by fiction."

– Amy Ireland

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Philosophy

106 pages, Paperback

Published January 30, 2021

Reviews

[Matthew Kinlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What can the passions do after bodies?” writes David Roden. A corpse on the television screen. Videodrome’s Professor Brian O’Blivion reads out the words, “Soon, all of us will have special names.” The corpse lowered into a chromium tank, resurrects into an infinite web of venom. Roden’s Snuff Memories reads like a blender of necrotic Cronenberg-esque horror, ancient mythos and schizo-cyberpunk. Inside a nest of Deleuzian rats, we watch William Gibson’s overdosed Mona Lisa explode into septic and orgasmic greens. Roden’s prose is constantly generative: reaching, mutant, expansive. A bionic-minotaur reanimated inside its exo-labyrinth. A silver zero made flesh. The horizon of a corpse, the end of all bodies.

[Ashley · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I did not know men could suffer, could be destroyed so, even as I watched him perforated somewhere near the spleen, Reni's saint, a fabric of soft folds and light, aching and smiling, lapsing into vision."

A bleak and tortuous plunge into the depths of Hell. A fragmented wasteland of broken, kaleidoscopic nightmares, a festering wound oozing rot and crawling with maggots, the single most definitive book for nihilistic dreamers that wish to gaze upon the abyss. Snuff Memories is all of these things and it's also, so, so much more. It's one of the saddest, most intense, most gut-wrenching and soul-destroying forms of experimental media out there, too. Poetic, extremely beautiful and absolutely mind-altering, Snuff Memories reads as if it's simply just intrusive thought poems smeared across the pages. It's exactly the kind of novel that will lead you to question if you're even sane anymore, or if your years of reading weird literature have finally ruined you beyond repair.

Packed to the very brim with gruesome, sickening, glorious body horror, this novel is told entirely without mercy. It's just honest, pure brutality. As beautiful as an irradiated sunset, as gorgeous as the rapture, Snuff Memories is the complete and utter loss of humanity in the most vulgar of ways. It's a massive, gaping, drooling maw full of sharp teeth ready to slice our heads off. It's fucking harsh, horrible, it's god-awful and absolutely nauseating, yet, it's a delightful little novel, too. It's the book of the end of the world, a reckoning in print form, a highly erotic, evocative and salacious catastrophe. Snuff Memories is an aesthetically pleasing apocalypse. There isn't even the tiniest shred of happiness, no respite, no safe place to hide from the wickedness, there exists only waves and waves of nastiness, there is only the slaughter.

" I think Father hoped Amplitude would cut off pieces of himself, forming a swarm intellect with which to leverage additional suicides. He retained a zest for paradox, but was too vague for self-harm; face blotched with one too many mouths; the rest of his porousness above the ceramite, fuzzed and wanking in open rebellion. This was not death as we knew it, but the beginning of an endless asymptote of decay."

It's entirely philosophical musings and masterful body horror drenched in acid washed nihilism. Getting to experience Snuff Memories is akin to being soaked in bleach or cast upon a pyre. This is absolutely not a novel for the faint of heart, nor is it the kind of novel for those who need a clear-cut story. Instead, Snuff Memories is a book for those readers who love a story of narratives, the ones who enjoy vignette style glimpses into the unknown, all while being force-fed run-on sentences and stream of consciousness style writing. It's a book that will slingshot even the most ardent of readers well beyond their comfort zone, it'll peel back the veil and force you to marvel upon horrors beyond your wildest dreams. The pull of a book such as this one is simply too much to ignore, even with its grotesque levels of depression and gore. You absolutely must experience it.

"We know we are all snuff memories. We accept a moral freedom, of a kind, that goes with a starless heaven and the Rat eating out our insides. Only an embrace, disclosed in a moment. The moment we seemed more than therapies harping around a wound"

[Elytron Frass · Rating 4 out of 5]

David Roden's Snuff Memories is a chain of intrusive thought compressions - an intellectual injectable of body horror prose poetics that infiltrate the mind in flavored rust pigments, a dreamer's skag.

[Fede · Rating 2 out of 5]

I do understand what the author is doing, but I don't quite like the way he does it in this book. I like fragmented imagery and narration, and there are indeed a few gems here, along with several mind-blowing references to literature and philosophy. However, it all seems to lack something essential- some peculiar quality I was glad to find in the works of other authors with similar concerns (Shipley, Land, Burroughs, Supervert, and to a certain extent Deleuze and Guattari).
The concepts here are interesting, but the writing is way too boring for the book to live up to them. What a shame though.

[SUP · Rating 1 out of 5]

I know Roden's work. Sadly the man is not good at writing or philosophizing. He frequently makes big jumps in his more philosophical works for the sake of edge-lordy speculations. His prose in those works is fine, just standard prose that can be accepted by a journal or continental anthology. But in Snuff Memories, he also wants to come off as a stylistic avantgarde writer. The result is like the 80s bad hairdos, a discombobulated mess of comparative literature and postmodern theory.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The scene: imagine you're a caveman. Chilling in your cave, doing normie caveman shit. Tending the fire, scoring with your cavelady. Then you wake and find yourself in 2025. Everyone talks in gibberish. Cars try to mow you down at every crossing. Strangers scream into black boxes. Metallic objects roam the sky. You've been born into a nightmare.

This book does the same thing, but sends those of our current era into a future so odd that no sci-fi terms will render it comprehensible. Humanity is so changed that it barely feels like the same species. Don't expect this book to make sense. Instead, relish the confusion of being granted a glimpse of a future wholly outside our ability to navigate.

[KungFooey · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 because some aspects were really nice, but at times eh or flat out monotonous

[Max Svalgard · Rating 1 out of 5]

Meh

[Rebecca Lambert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Entering David Roden’s, Snuff Memories, is akin to entering that dark forest your parents warned your teenage self about. Your rational self knows that you shouldn’t cross its threshold, that there’s danger within, but the lure of its tenebrose pathways is too strong to resist, you are compelled to persist.
Upon entering, all sense of time and place disappears. Beings, as beguiling, as they are repulsive, beckon you from just beyond the shadows, lulling you with their seductive siren songs. Although you know you should turn back, return to the safety of your world, you cannot. The everyday, the light, the mundane, has lost the final vestiges of interest that you have limply clasped on to, for far too long.
If you are seeking out an easy-read, cerebrally comforting, erotic body-trembler, Snuff Memories probably isn’t the book for you.
If, however, you want to be challenged, want to channel Nicki Brand, want to feel bloodied and bruised, but ultimately released by the time time you close the final page, then enter David Roden’s Snuff Memories.
You may never be able to find your way back out of the forest, but why would you want to?…

[Melissa Luther · Rating 4 out of 5]

A pithier reviewer than us would open with something like, "What would posthumans eat for Naked Lunch?" And maybe this book is, in fact, Interzone rocketed into some odd future, generations hence when we've finally accepted the "trans" in transhumanism.

An "experimental" novel with footnotes is an interesting thing. Especially when the citations are all stuff one has read or listened to or listed as tbr. Like, we were literally listening to the Puce Mary album Roden cites the morning we started reading this.

So it seems like one of those works that's hard to write about without reaching for references. But let's try. The posthuman doesn't strictly follow from the human. There is an x-factor, a darkly unpredictable sets of variables entirely illegible to anyone still-human.

Snuff Memories is a paean to those unknowns, and a damn fine elucidation thereof. It insists upon itself without explaining a shred of what it shows us. It is sex and violence and enough med-fet to fill a deranged doll's Tumblr.

It's really good.

[WOLF EARS · Rating 3 out of 5]

Xenoerotica at its finest, even if still retain all-too-human tendencies. One can't help but wonder about the author's preferences in shaping the various sexual encounters and descriptions in here, which I find extra sickening and disappointing in a work aiming for posthuman paraphilia.
On the other hand, I enjoy how unexpectedly cyberpunk this can feel. The power dynamics between characters involved in alien sex acts mirrors the implicit struggles between organizations of very obscure natures (religious, political, military?)
It's worth it even if only because there's not much out there like it.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A jolly old mallarkey in the realm of the post-human. For more details, see here:
https://discontinuednotes.com/2021/10...

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is so hard to review, but experimental and well worth checking out. An Erotic horror story that is mindbending.

[Creede Kurtz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Terrible book, but I enjoyed it.

[Elijah · Rating 2 out of 5]

While I love my stream-of-consciousness brain damage lit, this one was too scattered for me.