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Lullaby
by Chuck Palahniuk
(Jonathan Cape, £10.00, paperback, 272 pages, 5 September 2002; ISBN:
0224063014.)
Chuck Palahniuk's first four novels -- from the notoriously  transgressive
Fight Club to the hilariously extreme Choke -- have all
been bizarre. And yet, despite their unlikely characters and entertainingly
preposterous plot twists, they have always stayed just this side of
possible.
With his fifth novel, Lullaby, Palahniuk steps firmly and boldly
into the realm of the impossible. Lullaby is a modern-day dark
fantasy featuring haunted houses, witches, dangerous spells, pagan rituals,
and the like.
Independently of each other, Helen Hoover Boyle, a corrupt real-estate
agent who deals in haunted houses, and Carl Streator, a journalist assigned
to investigate Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, discover that a child's
poem is in reality an ancient culling spell, lethal to any to whom it
is recited.
Joined by the twenty-something Wiccans Mona and Oyster, the forty-something
Carl and Helen embark on a cross-country journey to destroy all copies
of the book that contains the lethal verse. In the process, the quartet
becomes a twisted version of the American nuclear family, where deep-rooted
power imbalances create tense and complex conflicts.
Like all of Palahniuk's novels, Lullaby is a first-person narrative
from the point of view of a dysfunctional antihero; in this case, Carl,
who, despite his wish to rid the world of the deadly spell, casually
becomes a supernatural serial killer.
The beginning of the novel is a bit clumsy; the prologue is unnecessary,
and chapter 1 isn't as tight and focused as Palahniuk usually is right
from page one. But from chapter 2 onwards, Lullaby is otherwise
flawless: darkly sardonic and filled with wild invention, penetrating
quips, subversive ideas, and relentless energy.
Originally published in The Montreal Gazette,
Saturday, 28 September 2002.
Claude Lalumière's Fantastic Fiction
is a series of
capsule reviews first published in the Saturday Books
section of The Montreal Gazette.
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