Over the past few months, I’ve been reading Chuck Palahniuk’s “Lullaby”, and after finishing; I’ve come out of the experience finding it a very mixed bag. The book stars Carl Streator, a middle-aged reporter who finds a magical “culling song” that can kill people when recited in a seemingly ordinary poem collection. He accidentally memorizes the song, and essentially becomes a serial killer, singing it to people over slight annoyances or even on accident. Eventually he joins up with 3 other characters, Helen, a realtor who’s gotten rich off selling haunted houses to people and buying them back, Mona, Helen’s new-age assistant, and Oyster, an environmental extremist, to get rid of the remaining copies of the collection.
The book gets off to a really strong start, after the prologue introduces Helen / Mona's real-estate scam; the first chapter frames the rest of the story as Streator explaining how he got into his current situation where he's going around investigating supernatural incidents. The next few chapters are far more normal, centering on Streator being assigned to cover babies who died of SIDS, which sets up an interesting mystery of what caused him to get in contact with all this supernatural stuff. In general, I really liked how the magic was integrated into the story; it has an ancient air to it, the big book of spells is called the "grimoire”, and the incantations are written in dead languages like Latin; even then, they feel like they're from time immemorial, merely recorded by these civilizations.
This mystique is further enhanced by Streator's narration, he has a very blunt, straightforward writing style that sharply contrasts the modern-day America setting with the ancient magic and mythology the characters are messing around with. He does cross the line into being pretentious at times though, he frequently kills with the culling song, often for less-than-noble reasons; but he still finds it fit to constantly lecture other characters with knowledge of it about how evil their activities are. He also often rants about the evils of modern media; I think the culling song is supposed to connect to the way media often propagandizes people; but I just don't see much similarity between a magical killing spell and the government sending propaganda over the radio or whatever. It ultimately comes off as completely disconnected from the actual story and a waste of time.
That disjointed feeling is a problem with a lot of aspects of the book, the SIDS deaths are almost completely dropped halfway through the story, Streator's parents get a mention in like 1 chapter before being completely dropped, Mona and Oyster are presented as the "son" and "daughter" while Helen and Streator are called "mom" and "dad" while they're on the road, which made me think they had some hidden connection, but nope; they're just completely unrelated people that have nothing to do with each other. But the biggest disappointment are the "sarge" chapters, sometimes the story will cut back from the main plot to focus on Streator's present investigating the supernatural. In the final chapters it's revealed that the "sarge" character he's with is actually Helen, who jumped into his body using an occupation spell at the last moment after Mona and Oyster got the grimoire and made her kill herself using that same spell. While a cool reveal, the book missed a great opportunity to conclude their stories by having them either succeed in their goal to kill Mona / Oyster, or be forced watch the world totally burn. There were absolutely enough chapters to make a story within a story out of them while preserving the mystery, but instead that whole subplot ends on some random chapter about a talking cow and the ending is left totally open.
Overall, it's a great concept that suffers from mediocre execution. I had a great time while reading and it's very much a page turner, but I was really relying on the ending to tie things up nicely, and it just... didn't. A lot of subplots are randomly dropped as previously mentioned, which causes the 3 acts to almost feel like separate books at times; meanwhile the philosophical aspects are shoehorned in and feel like they have virtually no connection to what's going on. It's still decent, don't get me wrong, but it feels like a fraction of what it could've been.