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A Review by Chris Bolton

Horror is a tricky genre: by definition, it exists to shock and frighten the reader. No wonder so many "horror" writers now eschew the term in favor of a label like "dark fantasy." How many times can a writer jump out and yell "Boo!" before you get bored and go home?

I was once an avid reader of horror, until its writers had yelled "Boo!" in every conceivable manner. I became bored with the repetition and affectations of the genre: the tired-and-true formula of Dean Koontz, the overwrought melodrama of Anne Rice, and the endless variations spun by their imitators. Only a few times did I close a book in unease and stay away until I felt brave enough to venture inside it again. Lullaby is the first such book in years.

Chuck Palahniuk has conceived a good scare. I would even say it’s a great scare, although it’s not the kind that makes you gasp in white-knuckled shock — like Stephen King’s best — nor is it the kind that creeps under your skin and gives you a feeling of supernatural doom, as Blatty does in The Exorcist. Palahniuk’s scare is somewhat more resonant because it’s the kind that makes you ask, Would I do that? And the implications of that answer are chilling.

What disturbed me was a section in which the protagonist, crime reporter Carl Streator, memorizes an African lullaby, or "culling song," that kills people who hear it recited. In fact, as Carl soon discovers, he can kill people by merely thinking it — and before long the whole song runs through Carl’s head in a split-second. Barely the blink of an eye. So when someone bumps into him in the street, the culling song runs through his mind, and the annoying cad drops dead before Carl can even consider the consequences. Like a bad song stuck in his head, Carl can’t forget the lullaby — and he can’t seem to stop himself from using it impulsively.

Carl isn’t the first person to discover the culling song’s secret. A real estate agent named Helen Hoover Boyle (who specializes in selling haunted houses to unwary buyers) learned the hard way, after killing her husband and infant baby. She and Carl team up with an odd young couple — a Wiccan named Mona and an eco-terrorist named Oyster — to travel the country, destroying all existing copies of the lullaby.

The journey itself represents the weakest point in Palahniuk’s plot. For about fifty pages we are treated to several variations on the same scene: the unlikely quartet in a car, going to a house or library or bookstore, Helen handling business on her cell phone while Mona chatters naively and Oyster espouses on the corruption of the natural world (and Carl counts to a hundred so he won’t think the culling song and kill them all). It’s funny the first few times, and the characters are always engaging — especially Oyster, who comes off like a bratty-little-brother version of Fight Club's Tyler Durden — but a little bit of this goes a long way.

That said, I would rather read Chuck Palahniuk’s "weakest" section than many writers’ strongest. (And who can dislike a section that includes the quick demise of a Dr. Laura counterpart?) Even in this comparatively lackluster middle, Palahniuk’s sharp-edged wit shines through, as when we discover the scheme that is the source of Oyster’s income — an ingenious scheme, by the way, that I wish I’d thought of before the book was published. With Palahniuk, the magic is in the details, and he provides a ton of them. Oyster points out one man-made folly after another — and although I haven’t checked their factual validity, each historical anecdote is intriguing.

Even more refreshing is Palahniuk’s growth as a writer. Perhaps the tragedy of his father’s murder and the subsequent trial of his killer (which the author has cited as prevailing influences over the book) have given Palahniuk a sense of reflection and depth. He retains the sardonic, brutal edge that made terrific reads of Fight Club and Survivor while simultaneously exploring the heretofore neglected realms of his characters’ emotional lives. Carl and Helen, in particular, earn our sympathy in ways that might embarrass the characters of earlier Palahniuk books. Not that Chuck is getting soft: there is genuine, transcendent beauty in the scene of Carl and Helen making love while using a levitation spell, and tangling themselves in a ceiling chandelier – but a revelation a short while later casts a dark shadow on the event. Palahniuk is one of those rare writers who finds and exalts in the beauty lurking amidst ugliness.

Much as I enjoyed the little moments and the big details of Lullaby, and even as Palahniuk’s economical yet [evocative] prose moved me effortlessly along, what resonates strongest from his joyride of a novel is the memory of that culling song. Specifically, I recall the sickening throb in my stomach as I closed the book and imagined myself sitting on the bus, tightening my fists and gritting my teeth as I endure a tirade from another smelly drunk in the next seat — trying hard not to just think him right out of existence. Some days I might not try hard enough.

This is arguably Palahniuk’s greatest gift: his ability to jab his finger right on the sharpest point of a nerve we might not even have known was exposed. In Fight Club, it was the growing dissatisfaction with a materialistic world bent on conformity and consumption; in Survivor, the dangerous pervasiveness of pop-culture icons; and now, in Lullaby, he taps into the noise that surrounds us, the noise we wish we could drown out — and he makes us wonder to what lengths we might go for that blessed silence.