To Die From

By now everyone is bound by law to be intimately familiar with what Rolling Stone calls "The Cult of Chuck."

Palahniuk that is, who happens to be the wordslinger behind the fisticuff classic, Fight Club (made of course into that ultra fine Fincher feature), as well as - among others - the surprise New York Times bestseller, Choke. Chuck has carved for himself a peculiar place in Popdom where everyone has an ornately checkered past. The future's at best uncertain and it's A-OK to let a wicked imagination run away with your present - and your pals. The velocity - and the absurdity - by which he gets to the truth of the matter tends to unsettle the squeamish, but the truth is kind of like that. Palahniuk's popularity is due to the simple fact that his mad, bad and dangerous world is nothing more - and nothing less - than our very own, twisted into a Swiftian knot and skinned to its very rotten core.

Get used to it.

LullabyLullaby (Doubleday, $24.95) puts Palahniuk's spot-on skin peel to melody. The title track, an ancient African "culling song" concocted to ease a sick child into the next world, has become an unexpected hit with the bassinet set. Soft and sweet - and indelibly deadly - the lullaby lulls each listener into a very permanent sleep. "Imagine a plague you catch through your ears," warns the tagline. Yeah, imagine then hum along.

In limps Carl Streator, a frumpy features reporter assigned to investigate the sudden rash of crib deaths. Probing and prodding, the flappably unflappable Mr. Streator Colombos-out one telling continuity among the crime scenes - a book entitled Poems and Rhymes Around The World. Coincidentally, no one has made it past page 27. It's a coincidence begging for more consequence.

Things spiral downward from there as tragedy befalls Carl's family and the damned fool mistakenly memorizes the deadly song. Soon the narrator is dropping people like flies, sometimes on purpose, but sometimes by accident. In fact, singing away like a child who's had the damn song implanted in his brain, Streator can't stop murdering.

In the midst of the killing spree, Streator stumbles upon an obscenely-baubled haunted house broker named Helen Hoover Boyle, who banks heavily on bloody walls and bouncing severed heads. Clad in an immortality complex as grand as it is arrogant, Dame Helen not only shares the secret of the sacred song, she knows - and - wants where it comes from: The Book of Shadows.

But what to do? Playing second-fiddle Clyde to Boyle's faux-class Bonnie isn't Streator's idea of perfect harmony, but it's a dissonance necessary if souls are to be saved from this song. Helen, of course, would rather add to her own repertoire. Diametrically opposed, yet mutually emboldened, the duo latch-up with Helen's trusty Wican sidekick and her brash, young, eco-extortionist boyfriend, gas-up the Sedan de Mentia, and head out on the off-the compass roadtrip of their lives.

Things only get worse before they get even worse, which bodes swell for the voyeur but not so well for anyone else. As things keep falling apart, people get cranky, kooky, or killed. Perhaps if everyone stopped playing God they'd all just get along.

Perhaps not. This is Palahniuk, and there's no justs about it. Few among us don't have some kinda God game going, every hustle striking just south of Heaven. Fewer still can get along with themselves, let alone others. Blind-sided by a nostalgia we never had, we can't stop longing for the way we never were; lured into a want that we don't need, we won't stop pushing for more than we can get. All this makes for a damn beautiful sore sight indeed. How we're gonna end up is everyone's guess; meantime lets thank our luckless stars we've got Palahniuk to kick some ass along the way.

Palahniuk plays hard among a long and illustrious line of ass-kicking scribes - from those who went against nature (Huysmans, Lautremont), those who corrupted the natural order (Octave Mirbeau, Katherine Dunn), and those who very nature was, well, supra-natural (Jarry, Calvino). Think Rabelais after Crews hits him with a weed wacker and you get the idea. More, though - and finally - Lullaby is pure Palahniuk, as honest as a street fight and thrice as entertaining. Oh, and these cuts and bruises? That's enlightenment man.

Note: This article was first published online in the now defunct Bully Magazine. Supplied with immense thanks to Ken Wohlrob.

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