Posted on August 06, 2008 by WiseMonk

But words can hurt like hell.

Like the words from Lullaby, another one of Palahniuk’s novel, and I will tell you about it a little bit in this post.

Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a forty-ish newspaper reporter who isassigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scene of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant or “culling song.” This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone’s direction and once it lodges in Streator’s brain, he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle, who specializes in selling haunted (or “distressed”) houses (wonderfully high turnover) and who lost a child to the culling song years before, for a cross-country odyssey. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen’s assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic eco-terrorist boyfriend, Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.

“Several years ago, sailors on long voyages used to leave a pair of pigs on every deserted island. Or they’d leave a pair of goats. Either way, on any future visit, the island would be a source of meat. [...] The sailors, the next time they visited these islands, the only things still there would be herds of goats or pigs. …. Does this remind you of anything? Maybe the ol’ Adam and Eve story? …. You ever wonder when God’s coming back with a lot of barbecue sauce?”

“Maybe this is why so many serial killers work in pairs. It’s nice not to feel alone in a world full of victims or enemies.”

“Power corrupts. And absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix. He’s making sure your attention is always filled. And this being fed, it’s worse than being watched. With the world always filling you, no one has to worry about what’s in your mind. With everyone’s imagination atrophied, no one will ever be a threat to the world.”

“There are worse things than finding your wife and child dead. You can watch the world do it. You can watch your wife get old and bored (yeah, bored to death just like me!). You can watch your kids discover everything in the world you’ve tried to save them from. Drugs, divorce, conformity, disease”.