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Title: Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk ISBN: 0-385-50447-0 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 17 September, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.92 (131 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Our Hero
Comment: Lullaby finds Chuck Palahniuk in a transitional phase. Chances are the Portland author won't be competing with the likes of Stephen King any time soon. And his fans should be thankful.
As a horror novel, Lullaby is anything but a traditional entry in the heavily commercialized genre. Palahniuk's sinister sense of humor prevents the author's fourth novel from achieving a significant scare factor. Or at least the typical horror type of fright.
Our hero is Helen Hoover Boyle. She is a real estate agent with an eye for "distressed" property. The kind of homes where the only permanent residents are not exactly of this world. Helen Hoover Boyle sells haunted houses. She sells them to normal families who seem happy enough, until blood starts running down the walls. After that, the buyers will scramble out of there before they even start unpacking their boxes. Easy money for a realtor who knows where to look. And with the help of a police scanner and a practitioner slash secretary named Mona, Helen Hoover Boyle is very good at what she does.
Our narrator is Carl Streator. A newspaper reporter who, while doing a story on sudden infant death syndrome, comes across a book of poems. More like a can of worms actually.
If words could kill.
The discovery of the infamous "culling song" lights the fuse of Lullaby's plot which eventually intersects the lives of our hero and our narrator, spiraling the book into a constantly building power struggle all the way until the bitter ending. With plenty of Palahniuk's signature quirks, Lullaby will surely satisfy Chuck's rapidly growing fan base.
It is the story just below the surface, however, that will get the wheels turning. Lullaby was inspired by the tragic killing of Palahniuk's own father. The murderer was eventually apprehended and convicted. During sentencing, Chuck had to testify as to whether he believed in the death penalty. Keep these facts (not included in the book) in mind, as they will provide a better appreciation of the novel.
Otherwise, Lullaby may prove just too darn entertaining for the average reader to even notice the deeper message. It is truly a page-turning, hilarious ride. Take the horror sticker off and, in my mind, the brilliantly constructed third chapter is reason enough to buy this one today.
Rating: 3
Summary: Interesting but repetitive
Comment: "Lullaby" tells the story of Carl Streator, a newspaper reporter investigating SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) for an upcoming article. As Carl delves into his investigation, a peculiar pattern begins to emerge: a fairytale book, "Poems and Songs from Around the World," is always nearby when a baby dies from SIDS. Carl eventually discovers that the book contains a "culling song," an ancient African song capable of killing anyone who hears it -- instantly. Armed with the culling song's power, Carl soon becomes an unwitting murderer; even *thinking* the culling song in someone's direction is enough to kill that person. Along the way, Carl meets up with Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who deals in haunted houses, her Wiccan secretary Mona, and Mona's boyfriend, Oyster. Forming an "anti-nuclear family", they set out on a cross-country road trip to destroy all known copies of the song book, before the "virus" is able to spread any further.
Palahniuk's premise is certainly intriguing (albeit difficult to swallow at times), but he stumbles with the execution. The culling song presents the kernel of an interesting idea, but the book feels padded even at a slim 260 pages -- simply put, this is an idea that would have worked much better as a short story. Palahniuk is clumsy in communicating his major themes, taking a heavy-handed approach that simply involves bludgeoning the reader into submission through sheer repetition.
But there is an even larger problem here, one beyond the scope of just this book: Palahniuk is becoming repetitive. He has an incredibly unique voice, but it hasn't expanded much since "Fight Club" and "Survivor". While reading "Lullaby", I was suddenly struck by an observation -- all of the characters sound exactly alike -- in this novel *and* in Palahniuk's other novels. Likewise, the themes of nihilism, media saturation, and salvation-through-destruction are used and re-used over and over. I understand that authors have common themes that they revisit, but after a while, it begins to feel more like a rut than a style. Palahniuk needs to show more growth in this area quickly or he runs the risk of being seen as a one-trick pony.
Overall, the book is interesting, but it never rises above the level of just "OK". If you've never read Palahniuk before, I'd recommend reading either "Fight Club" or "Survivor" instead of this. Here's hoping that Palahniuk branches out into some new areas with his next novel.
Rating: 4
Summary: Lullaby Review
Comment: "Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born?" (Palahniuk 228)Insightful questions such as these appear throughout Chuck's book which starts off to be about a solitary widower who is reporting on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Through seemingly unimportant events and random plot twists, this reporter, Carl Streator,connects the deaths to a book wich contains a poem that is a culling spell and kills whoever hears it. He meets Helen, her wiccan secretary Mona, and Mona's boyfriend Oyster and together the 'family' drive cross country to root out the existance of the book whithout killing everyone in the process.
Lullaby presents the reader with many questions and ideas that were probably not considered at first. "Imagine a plague you catch through your ears..." It becomes a series of plot twists and suprising events that lead to the truth that Palahniuk is a literary genius of dark humor.
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Title: Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk ISBN: 0385498721 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 04 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Choke: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk ISBN: 0385720920 Publisher: Anchor Pub. Date: 11 June, 2002 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Invisible Monsters by Chuck Palahniuk ISBN: 0393319296 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: September, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.95 |
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Title: Diary: A Novel by Chuck Palahniuk ISBN: 0385509472 Publisher: Doubleday Pub. Date: 26 August, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk ISBN: 0805062971 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company, Inc. Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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