Lullaby

Carl Streater is a journalist with a shady past who's working on a story about SIDS. After interviewing several families with mysteriously dead children he begins to notice a pattern. In each nursery is a copy of the same book of lullabies. Each book is turned to the same page. An African culling song - a poem read to children during famines and soldiers dying of fatal wounds. Could this be the cause the dead babies? Simple, just test it.

But now Carl can't get the poem out of his head and anyone foolish enough to cut him off in traffic is dropping dead. He needs someone to teach him to control this power and he hopes that woman is Helen Hoover Boyle. She knows the culling song too, but now she spends her days selling haunted houses.

Easily Palahniuk's best work, this book is dark, funny and philosophical. Helen Boover Boyle is a perfect Palahniuk hero: cynical and world-weary and yet capable of change and redemption. The narrator, by comparison, is a bit of a mope, but he can still be incredibly funny. The road trip provides for some great dark riffs on the American family. Palahniuk's wry satire on media saturation is wonderful.

Admittedly, this is not the great horror novel it would like to be. Doesn't really freak you out the way a good horror story should, and the premise is a little silly. (If the Zulus really had developed a killing song, 19th Century African history would be quite different.) The grimoire is even sillier, for a variety of reasons.

Chuck Palahniuk is overrated. It is no mystery that he's become a cliche, a shadow of himself by turning into the idolized kind of idiot that he tends to write about. Nowadays Palahniuk is the institution he preaches about. Previous reviews here have talked about hipsters, that is very true, too. Let's all go buy anything by Palahniuk... he understands.

Palahniuk wasn't the first person to use this style of writing, a kind of shock literature for the sake of shocking (i.e. his later books) or something so incredibly subversive that it makes you gasp out loud or faint (i.e. Haunted, the story Guts.)

All the same, Palahniuk is a good author. He tells a solid story that's chock-full of nihilist philosophy that should be more than enough to show more make any high school student feel brilliant and oh so trendy. It's full of philosophy that is interesting enough to make them start thinking, or at least most of the readers start thinking. It's solid enough plot-wise to make an entertaining read.

Coming at Palahniuk older, I no longer see the genius that I did before, but I do see a book that's entertaining enough to keep me reading -- I see a book that's clever enough to make me smirk as I do, and I read enough of the hardcore philosophy to make me consider some things.

My hat's off to Palahniuk, he's not the first not the last, not the worst and not the best, but man is he making a lot of money doing what he's doing.

Shine on you crazy bastard. show less

I'm so paranoid, thanks Chuck. Lullaby plays on every single one of my fears, from the most primal fear of ghosts and bloody things to the modern day liberal neo-hippie fear of slow death by overstimulating media and/or ecological apocalypse. It's a very manipulative book (and a thrilling ride) but I can't help feeling like sensational novels and science fiction (of a sort) are yet another form of overstimulation, even when firing the imagination on all cylinders and calling for an end to spiritual death by pop culture.

This was weird because it jumped around in time quite a bit and it was also somewhat preachy. The ecoterrorist guy was clearly created so that Palahnuik could have someone’s mouth in which to put all of his ecological beliefs and rants. As a character though, it made Oyster thoroughly unlikable.

The sub-plots were more entertaining than the main plot though. I liked the haunted house broker. What a scam! She could keep on turning over the couple dozen or so houses she had because no one could live in them for more than a few weeks. Excellent.

I also kind of liked it when Streator simply killed off the people who got him angry (mister mcgee, don’t make me angry, you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry). Oh how wonderful a power like show more that would be sometimes. Although, I’m not sure I would have the necessary control to avoid becoming a mass killer!

Another sub-plot is Streator and a character named Sarge are tracking down all kinds of purported ‘miracles’. Like a talking cow that tells people not to eat meat. A roadside jesus who brings roadkill back to life. A flying holy Mary type woman. It turns out that Sarge is really Helen the real estate lady. She found some master book of spells and she took over the body of this old cop. She had to do this because Oyster also got a hold of one of the spells and took over her body and made her drink drain cleaner. So to escape death, she transported over. Now she and Streator are after Oyster and the Wiccan chick. Oyster wanted to make everyone his slaves and if he finds the culling song, they’re screwed. But I couldn’t tell that this was really the conclusion of the book interwoven with the rest of it. By the first person point of view it was obvious that Streator lived in the end, but I couldn’t figure out who Sarge was until near the end when Helen first took over his body in order to spring Streator from jail. He was brought in because of a string of killings (all his fault of course) and he really wanted to be locked up an stopped because he couldn’t control it anymore.

Helen, as it turns out, knew about the culling song all along. She lost a son to it and then killed her husband because he blamed her. Yeah, it was her fault but she didn’t knowingly kill her kid. So she begins to work as a killer for hire. She kills drug lords and evil dictators and assassins, all for different governments. She figures if you do something for money, a lot of money, you won’t do it for free. It almost works. show less

Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for writing novels that could be short stories. When it's good, his prose is tight, muscular and punchy. But when it's bad, you wish the novel had been a story, you think it ought to be 40 pages long at the most, and all the slick one-liners and quirky details that would jazz up a good story become in the novel just overwrought or too-frequent gimmicks. This is one of those books.

The story is fascinating, a bizarre sort of postmodern fantasy, something akin to magical realism but with none of the attendant mysticism and awe--Palahniuk remains all cynicism and grit, as we like him. His plot is deceptively complex and his characters, though at first seemingly shallow and serving only the necessities of the show more story, become so well developed over the course of the novel that I was reluctant to let them go. And while many disparage his endings as weak or undeserved, in this novel I found the wrap-up quite satisfactory. I only wish it hadn't taken so much overt stylizing and cheap repetition to get there. show less

The Basics

Carl Streator is an investigative journalist, and he has been tasked with finding a pattern among babies who died of crib death. He does find a pattern. The same book of poems in each house, marked on the same page. It turns out this is a culling song, and anyone who hears it dies. Now that Streator has this power, controlling it is turning out to be a challenge.

My Thoughts

Palahniuk wrote this book as a reaction to his father’s death, and it does concern itself heavily with the topic of death. How people do or don’t deal with it. Having the power to take life in your hands. Holding on when you probably shouldn’t anymore. It’s a short book to have said so much. That is Palahniuk’s power, in that he’s concise and yet show more remains poetic and capable of cramming so much message into a few words without wasting a single one.

I do find trouble getting down to why I didn’t find this a five star affair. I thought the narrator, Carl, was relatable even in his faults, and his personal story was a slow, satisfying reveal. The overall story is a success for the most part, though I will say the reveal about the grimoire felt cheap, as if he wanted to hurry up and get to the point and that was the best way to do it. Other than that quirk, I enjoyed the plot.

I think most irritating of all was Oyster. He was intentionally an annoyance, I realize that. I’m having trouble expressing this without spoiling the book, but a character this absolutely insufferable in a book concerned with people who can kill with their minds… It didn’t add up for me or pan out the way I would’ve wanted. I’ll say the book was very successful in making us feel exactly how Carl felt every time Oyster opened his mouth, and we wouldn’t have an entire story without that character with the way Palahniuk structured it. But he did his job too well. Oyster was too much of a douche, and the sheer frustration of that knocked this down a peg.

That’s a personal nitpick over a book that was good and worthy of a read. Other readers may cope with Oyster better than I did.

Final Rating

4/5 show less