Ex Libris: Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby

We all know the first rule of Fight Club as stated in that popular movie: You do not talk about Fight Club. That's not a problem. After all, Chuck Palahniuk's rabid fans are one of the scarier aspects of this author's works.

Instead, let's talk about Palahniuk's other books. In this case, it's Lullaby: a veritable tome on the mundane horrors of life despite its supernatural face. And such horrors Palahniuk presents with a nonchalant tone that will definitely send chills down the reader's spine.

Here, Carl Streator, a beleaguered reporter dealing with the grief of losing his wife and child, discovers that a series of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) may be due to an ancient African lullaby, a culling poem: the same poem behind the deaths of his own loved ones. He then comes to know another victim of the poem, Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent dealing with 'distressed' or haunted homes, and finds out the true extent of the poem's devastating potential.

After inadvertantly memorizing the poem and turning into a repressed killer dealing death to anyone who crosses his path, Streator goes on a road trip with Boyle (who also telepathically assassinates for the highest bidder on her spare time) plus two others on a search-and-destroy mission for copies of the poem throughout the libraries of America.

Weird? That's Palahniuk for you as he peoples his stories with such dysfunctional characters that normalcy becomes abnormal. The two protagonists who later become lovers are so unlikeable that the reader has to favor them with a pitying eye: Streator is misanthropic while Boyle is an opportunist. Likewise, there's also Mona (Boyle's empty-headed, scheming Wiccan secretary) and Oyster (her extremist environmentalist of a boyfriend).

Through his biting wit and dry humor, Palahniuk opens up a veritable can of ideas in the reader's head as he deals with media saturation and the concept of a meme as a literal plague that you can catch through your ears. Despite the heavy-handed approach of his theme, Palahniuk parses the consequence of combining mass information and free will into a weapon: If you had the power to kill anyone without being caught, will you do it? Does the end justify the means?

It does get tiring after all though: Palahniuk's style of reiterating his message over and over (like a favored blunt object) through his prose becomes as strident as the stereo that the narrator's neighbors play over-loud in his apartment. But maybe that's his point:

Up through the floor, someone's barking the words to a song. These people who need their television or stereo or radio playing all the time. These people so scared of silence. These are my neighbors. These sound-oholics. These quiet-ophobics.

...These days, this is what passes for home sweet home home.

Prose-wise, Palahniuk's words have a tendency to sneak through the reader's consciousness until it curls up cozily in his or her medula oblongata like a sly devil. He's a friendly son-of-a-bitch, Palahniuk's narrative voice, and you can't help but be lured-- and lulled-- into hearing his story.

For example, he avoids cliché by describing green as it appears on the felt of a pool table, but only when the red number three ball is upon the felt, as opposed to the yellow number one. Or green is not lime but rather like the color of key lime pie, not avocado but avocado bisque topped with a thin sliver of lemon. As one Amazon reader says, this level of description is "not meant as sleight of hand or an effort to fill space; it makes the reading incredibly rich, or perhaps lush." And very personal too, I might add.

There are certain kinds of writers that are a reading experience. Palahniuk is one, as he looks with an acerbic eye at humanity and love in general and the media, rural legends, necrophilia, the establishment, haunted houses, censorship, and the silence that fills us in a noise-saturated world specifically.

Spread the Suman Latik plague.

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(Yes, I know I'm cheating. But it's true: Suman Latik is a meme game, right? And I kinda forgot it's Suman Latik Wednesday. I don't even know why I have to explain this. Grrr...)