"You scare me," a visitor recently tells Chuck Palahniuk, author of the newly released "Lullaby: A Novel," and, more famously, 1996's "Fight Club," a cult novel that was made into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. He looks shocked and wounded.
And he should. Palahniuk, 40, is not a scary person. He is neat, almost fastidious in his appearance and manner. He speaks clearly in complete sentences and fully formed ideas. But the eyes give it away. The eyes are wild.
They are the eyes of the man who wrote in "Fight Club": "Pounding that kid, I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn't screw to save its species and every whale or dolphin that gave up and ran itself aground. Don't think of this as extinction. Think of this as downsizing."
They are the eyes of the man who wrote in "Lullaby": "Spraying blood, Helen says, 'No, No, No!' and crawling through the sharp slivers of broken color, her voice thick and blurred from her ruined teeth, she grabs all the pieces. Sobbing, covered in bile and blood, the room stinking, she clutches the broken blue pieces. The hands and tiny feet, the crushed torso and dented head, she hugs them to her chest and screams, 'Oh, Patrick! Patty!' "
These are the kinds of passages that upset Lynne Cheney. They are also the kinds of passages that make "cult" authors out of plain, old fiction writers. What does it mean to be a cult writer? It means you have Web sites dedicated to your work, people who try to re-create the world you created, people who dress up and act out and reinterpret again and again the meaning of your words as they apply to their lives.
"That's just my friends Amy and Dave," Palahniuk jokes of the myriad places floating in cyberspace where you can read about him.
Well, shucks. Critics love him too. Kirkus Reviews let its hair down in an uncharacteristically chummy review. "Outrageous, darkly comic fun." And from Booklist: "It's a fun ride, but what separates this novel from Palahniuk's previous work is its emotional depth, its ability to explore the unbearable pain of losing a child just as richly as it laments our consume-or-die worldview."
"Lullaby" (Doubleday) has a totally engaging, thoroughly ingenious plot: There is a book, "Poems and Lullabies From Around the World," that contains poems to quiet children so they can sleep. It contains one lullaby (on page 27) that also kills them. The mysterious deaths are attributed to crib death.
