My relationship with Mr. Palahniuk's work can be summed up by the word ambiguous. I always like what I read by him, and I think his books are interesting, but I'm also never sure if I'm finding anything new in them. I feel like sometimes there's too much craziness, the characters are too far out there, for me to really identify with what's happening. I'll have to think about this some more. I'll get back to you.
In Lullaby, the main character is a reporter who is investigating SIDs deaths, and because he is a good little reporter, he notes everything about the scene, down to the book each person had read to their child before bed. His journalistic OCD ends up unlocking the secret to the deaths, which is that the book of children's poetry contains a culling song, a lullaby that actually ends up killing the person to whom it's directed. The reporter, Carl Streator, can't stop thinking about the poem in that way that whatever you least want to occupy your mind suddenly does, and he becomes a kind of unintentional serial killer, with people dropping dead all around him when he just thinks the poem in their direction. He decides to go on a kind of quest, destroying every copy of the book. In the process, he meets Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who sells and resells haunted houses; Helen's assistant Mona; and Mona's boyfriend Oyster, who runs fake lawsuit / PR nightmare scams on businesses he finds morally objectionable. There's the quest where Carl tries to get it under control, and eventually a grimoire (the original source of the culling song) gets discovered, and Mona and Oyster go on a magic fueled spree while Carl and Helen (sort of) track them across the country. You know, your average CP plotline.
The whole book is about power, and what you should do with it. When they realize they're not only looking for all the copies of the book in order to destroy them, but also the grimoire which likely contains all sorts of other spells too, the characters are divided as to what to do with it - should they keep it? Use it? Destroy it? What can go wrong? Who can benefit? Who's to decide? Interesting, but not groundbreaking, I think. More interesting were the other ways the characters had power, like Helen knowing about the hauntings, setting up her clients like a spider waiting to pounce. There are lots of these tiny little situations where the characters know something not everyone else does, and they have to decide what they should do with that information. Does it give them license to act or not? For example, there's a bookshop with multiple copies of the book of poems (and therefore the culling song). The books are lost somewhere inside the store, so rather than laboriously look for them, Helen and Oyster burn the place down. Are they right? Did the end justify the means?
The moral quandary that kept me thinking the longest is Helen's method of coping with her life and death power. You see, she also has memorized the culling song, having lost her own family to its powers. Carl wants to know how she manages to not go around killing people willy nilly, and the answer is that she kills in a controlled way. She vents her frustration and anger and desire to exercise her power on a daily basis by killing people who deserve it, dictators and murderers and other riff raff that her questionable morality decides it's okay to do away with. This was fascinating to me, not that she was venting in that way, doing the thing she can talk herself into justifying, but rather that once you have a power, once you can do something, you have to do it. That there's no way to just walk away, that you must use it. Do we see this in other places? Do you have to do something just because you can?
I cheated a little on this write-up because I gave the book away to someone before I wrote this review, so I had to look up the characters' full names. Wikipedia gave me a little backstory that was actually pretty interesting. He wrote Lullaby while he was trying to decide if he should recommend that the man who shot his dad and his dad's girlfriend be sentenced to death for said crimes. It was his way of mulling out the questions about death and who gets to decide who dies and how we should and shouldn't use power. The guy was sentenced to the death penalty, but it doesn't say how Chuck came down on the issue.
This counts toward my 100+ Challenge.
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