Lullaby

I finished this book around 8 AM this morning. It is now 3:30 PM. I am less impressed by it with each passing hour. I thought I should write something quick.

This is the only Palahniuk novel I have read. I was entertained and irritated in equal measures while it lasted. He can be very funny and the scenes are fully imagined. But I now have the feeling that his writing exists to make us appreciate just how good a writer Kurt Vonnegut really was. This is vacuous, glib stuff, ostensibly daring and outrageous but chickenshit at its core.

Paluhniuk likes to repeat himself, and a phrase that comes up several times is that every generation wants to be the last. Is that why it seems to me that the people who go on and on about this stuff seem to be kids? If so I embrace by fogeyism. I need more meat on the bones of my literary horror fiction, which is the category I suppose Lullaby falls into.