Lullaby

2003 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Choke and the cult classic Fight Club, a cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the apocalyptic thriller for our times.

Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or "culling song." This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction — and once it lodges in Streator's brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle — who specializes in selling haunted (or "distressed") houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before — for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.

On one level, Lullaby is a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection and control in an era of wildly overproliferated information: "Imagine a plague you catch through your ears . . . imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city." But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a suspenseful plot full of surprising twists and turns. Finally, because it is a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it is a blackly comic tour de force that reinforces his stature as our funniest nihilist and a contemporary seer.

"The latest comic outrage from Palahniuk concerns a lethal African poem, an unwitting serial killer, a haunted-house broker, and a frozen baby. In other words, the usual Palahniuk fare....Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you'd expect from Palahniuk." Kirkus Reviews

"It's great. It's better than great. It's edible, this story is juicy, delightful, funny, wicked, smart, silly....With Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk delivers what can only be described as a complete critical assessment, cut down, body slam of the banality of modern critical thought. With this novel, he tears everyone a new one, and smiles while doing it." Ain't It Cool News

"Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you'd expect from Palahniuk." Kirkus Reviews

Chuck Palahniuk's four other novels are the bestselling Fight Club, which was made into a film by director David Fincher, Survivor, Invisible Monsters, and Choke. He lives in Portland, Oregon.