A Few Words to Die By

It'

s been six years since Fight Club, his first novel, made him a cult figure. It's been one year since Choke made him a best seller. But Chuck Palahniuk is still inconsolable. The sheer, emasculating plenty of bourgeois life, all that stuff you can buy — it still sends him into an angry funk. In his new book he is also consumed by a world burdened with radio personalities, invasive kudzu, tormented anchovies and boring, phony jobs. There are writers who have a signature mood. What Palahniuk has is a signature posture: recoil.

When you are a writer with that many axes to grind, it's only a matter of time before you produce a novel about serial killers. Not that the offhand killings in Lullaby (Doubleday; 260 pages) involve anything so blunt as a hatchet. The murder weapons here are words. At fortysomething, Carl Streator has been a widower for 20 years. He is a recognizable Palahniuk character, the kind who deals with grief by building small scale models of churches, factories and houses, then stomping them to splinters until his feet bleed. Carl is a newspaper reporter working on a series about sudden infant death syndrome. Along the way he discovers a children's book containing a rhyme that can kill when the possessor reads it to anyone or even thinks it in his or her direction. Having memorized the fatal lines, Carl now holds that power. So, it turns out, does Helen Hoover Boyle, a brassy Realtor whose specialty is selling haunted houses to unsuspecting buyers — there's good money in the high turnover — and who long ago began putting the lethal verse to her own uses.

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The two set out cross-country to destroy every copy of the poem, bringing in tow Helen's assistant Mona, a hippie-ish "witch," and Mona's eco-ranting boyfriend Oyster, the most comically egregious tagalong since that sourpuss hitchhiker picked up by Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces. (Oyster describes Johnny Appleseed, who spread non-native plant life, as "a f______ biological terrorist.") All the while Carl struggles with his impulse to wipe out everybody in his path who annoys him. Because his path runs through barroom blowhards and rude librarians, to say nothing of Oyster, that's a lot of folks.

Dark riffing on modernity is the reason people read Palahniuk. His books are not so much novels as jagged fables, cautionary tales about the creeping peril represented by almost everything. It's a world so attracted to death that, as one character says, reincarnation seems like just a form of procrastination. If Palahniuk wears his spleen on his sleeve, for a lot of Lullaby he wears it well. Too bad that in the final stretch he steers into some demented supernatural gore, and you recall that the publisher is billing this book as Palahniuk's first attempt at a thriller. Anybody looking for chills in the Stephen King mode is going to wonder when the shivers are supposed to start. Readers looking for another of Palahniuk's funny anti-valentines to modern life will know where they are from page 1.