Flights

LULLABY

By Chuck Palahnuik

Random House

Fiction

260 pages 

A LULLABY is supposed to send you to sleep, but Chuck Palahniuk’s “Lullaby” kept me awake all night. Like the rest of his works such as “Fight Club,” “Choke” and “Diary,” Palahniuk’s fifth novel—a narrative dark fantasy–is so gripping that it kept me turning the pages.

“Lullaby” tells the story of Carl Streator, a reporter who is tasked to do an investigative story about the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, a mysterious plague that has hit a number of households. As he tags along the police during investigations of the infants’ deaths, he finds a pattern through one item commonly found in every death scene: a book titled “Poems and Songs from Around the World,” open on page 27. On that page is a culling song that African tribes used as a mercy killing tool for people in pain.

“The best way to waste your life,” Streator, the narrator, says, “is by taking notes. The easiest way to avoid living is to just watch. Look for the details. Report. Don’t participate.”

But Streator commits the mistake of participating in the story after discovering that the culling song, even by just thinking it, can kill anyone. His nagging editor is Streator’s first victim. And this is how this investigative reporter starts becoming a serial killer. He sings the song in his head and directs it at everyone—anyone– who annoys him, most particularly the “noise-aholics.”

Streator decides that his own addition to killing has to stop, and that the culling song has to be muted. He soon links up with Helen Hoover Boyle, a real-estate agent whom Streator suspects of killing her husband and baby through the lethal verse.  Helen Boyle, who sells haunted houses, is out to search for yet another black magic book, “The Book of Shadows” which contains other spells.

Streator and Boyle are joined by the young Wiccans Mona and Oyster as they embark on a cross-country journey to annihilate all copies of  “Poems and Songs from Around the World.”  In the process, the quartet becomes a twisted version of a nuclear family, where deep-rooted power imbalances create conflicts.

In “Lullaby,” the black magic and the supernatural are incorporated into the oppressive advocacies of the modern world, where the media, the advertising and marketing hoopla work like spells that manipulate consumers’ thoughts. The “media-holics,” Palahnuik calls them. 

Palahniuk’s deadpan humor is reminiscent of Kafka, his characters’ nihilistic attitude is a reminder of Camus, and his take on the supernatural incorporated into the real world has a touch of the Latin American literature.  But the twisted plotline, the rhythm of prose, the short and repetitive sentences that are so fun to read aloud are something unique to Palahniuk.

   This novel can be so hypnotic that it proves the central theme of “Lullaby” – the power of language. “Lullaby” put me under Palahniuk’s spell.