Palahniuk likes to repeat himself - churn around his ideas and kick at them from new angles. There’s threads of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters wandering around Lullaby, and it’s like getting all the in-jokes in a film. It’s a satisfying icing on a sweet, sweet cake.

The book’s about an old Zulu culling spell that’s turned into a nursery rhyme and killing babies around the world, and a reporter discovers this. By chanting the spell, either aloud or just mentally at people, he can kill anyone instantly. But it’s about more than that. It’s about a telepathic assassin who’s also an estate broker for haunted houses. It’s about witchcraft and a boy named Oyster. It’s about loss and accidental necrophilia. Clever little chap, that Palahniuk.

It’s not all sunshine and puppies, though. It all sorts of disintegrates into rapid paced thread-tying at the end, which is dizzying leaves you feeling a bit disjointed from the story. You end up having to sit back from the closed page for a few seconds wondering ‘what the hell happened there?’

But maybe more books should have us doing that. Maybe we should be left to mentally tease apart the last chapter so it really sinks into us and stains our literary bone.

Or maybe it’s getting late and my brain is running a few hamsters short.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 3:23 pm and is filed under Book Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.