by JULIET WATERS

“Some witches write their spells in runes, secret coded symbols,” Mona, a voluptuous Wiccan tells Carl Streator, narrator of Lullaby. “…Some write backward so the spell can only be read in the mirror… some write each line so it branches in a different direction… The only rule was, a spell has to be twisted. The more hidden, the more twisted, the more powerful the spell.”

If Chuck Palahniuk could write his novels backwards or in invisible ink or, like one book his characters discover, “bound in mummified skin and probably written in ancient cum,” one gets the feeling he might. But that would remove him from his niche on the bestseller list and send him right back to post-adolescent cult status. Instead he’s come up with this deeply twisted and entertaining, if preachy, allegory that, in usual Palahniuk style, is eerily prescient.

I don’t know if anybody else felt that weird sense of déja vu when the World Trade Center came tumbling down, then realized they’d seen something like it in Fight Club. This year we have his novel about a couple of snipers. They aren’t gun snipers. They can kill people just with their thoughts. But the mood of randomly falling bodies feels strikingly familiar, even if Palahniuk’s about the only person who would play this situation for comic appeal.

One half of the team is Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who specializes in selling and reselling haunted houses. It’s a great scam since the owners never want to stick around to sue her. “Forget those dream houses you only sell once every fifty years. Forget those happy homes. And screw subtle: cold spots, strange vapors, irritable pets. What she needed was blood running down the walls. She needed ice-cold invisible hands that pull children out of bed at night. She needed blazing red eyes in the dark at the foot of the basement stairs. That and decent curb appeal.”

The other half of the team is Streator, a journalist writing a feature on crib death, who has discovered that an African lullaby is killing babies, and anyone else it’s recited to. Once Streator has memorized the song, he discovers he can kill anyone just by thinking it.

When it’s this easy, killing can be a pretty hard habit to break. Streator doesn’t intend to become a serial killer, but once he’s killed an unreasonable boss, a noisy neighbour and annoying talk show host, he’s crossed a line. Before long, he’s rationalizing the killing, arguing that he’s only speeding up the soul death inflicted on people by television, radio, social conditioning, capitalism and whatever. Helen, who’s been using the lethal lullaby longer than Streator, is more evolved in her rationalization. As a sideline to real estate, she’s become a government assassin who kills drug lords and dictators. She figures that she and everyone else is better off if she funnels her murderous energy into something more productive.

But, as our heroes discover time and time again, “The more you kill, the more things stay the same.” And so they head out on a quest to rid the world of every copy of this lullaby.

Things get less interesting as Streator and Helen form a sort of family with Mona, the Wiccan, and her boyfriend Oyster, an eco-terrorist. Debates between Streator and Oyster over who deserves to live and die tend to be juvenile. Mona and Oyster aren’t particularly interesting characters, and for too long they sap the sexual tension between Helen and Streator. This is too bad because they make a surprisingly interesting couple. And even though there are some pretty gruesome moments between them (e.g. Helen throwing a cryogenically frozen baby across a room), there is a strangely poignant romance.

Of all his tricks, Palahniuk’s capacity to bring a sudden, unexpected depth to his menacingly funny characters is his saving talent. His novels can be as annoying as they are compelling, but in the end his passion transcends his limitations. :

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk, Doubleday, hc, 260pp, $37.95