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Epicurus.com - Lullaby
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List Price: $13.95
Our Price: $11.16
Your Save: $ 2.79 ( 20% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Anchor
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780385722193
ISBN: 0385722192
Label: Anchor
Manufacturer: Anchor
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 272
Publication Date: 2002-07-29
Publisher: Anchor
Release Date: 2003-07-29
Studio: Anchor
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Editorial Reviews:
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Ever heard of a culling song? It’s a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers.
Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song’s lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he’s reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. Accompanied by a shady real-estate agent, her Wiccan assistant, and the assistant’s truly annoying ecoterrorist boyfriend, Streator begins a desperate cross-country quest to put the culling song to rest.
Written with a style and imagination that could only come from Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby is the latest outrage from one of our most exciting writers at work today.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: as good as fightclub
Comment: i admit it.. chuck palahniuk is not for everyone, but for those who can stomach him .. he is brilliant.. borderline sick but over the board genius... lulaby is as good as fight club if not better..
the plot is brilliant, it is fast paced and entertaining with its fair share of the Palahniuk wisdom .. and although the plot is full of clues and giveaways, at least i myself did not see the surprises coming.. and the make perfect sense.. and although lulaby is based on a stretch of fiction, chuck palahniuk makes it very believable...
don't read other people's summary of the plot it will ruin it for you.. if you liked fightclub the movie or the book, you will love lullaby
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not sure about this one.....
Comment: I don't think much of this book. It is a little scattered. One thing will be going on and then the next it's something different. It's very hard to follow. It was one of those books I thought was never going to end. It was very hard to stay focused and finish reading this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: excrement on stilts
Comment: Strong words, perhaps, but having seen Fight Club, I believe neither Chuck nor his readers are pansies and can take it
And I'm counting 1, and I'm counting 2, and 3,
This, above, is what passes for showing rising anger in the book. The main character, Carl, stumbles upon an ancient song that kills people. Parents who read this lullaby to their babies kill them, and Carl is determined to find all the copies of the book and destroy them. On the way, he meets a real estate agent who assassinates people from a distance (using the song) in her spare time, a Wiccan, and a nature-loving, human-hating, power-hungry hunk named Oyster (oh and did I mention that Carl has anger management issues and a traumatic past?)
So there you have it: take something horrible, like the death of babies in their cribs, add a weird twist: lethal lullabies!, strange characters, freewheeling prose, miracles, psychopathic killers, environmental destruction... and write in a frenetic, hip way, so as to paper over the fact that you don't have a story, or a plot, or any idea what you want to do with this material
and I'm counting to 4, to 5, and to 6....
hey, I think i'll write a riff on modernity using that formula and no plot... do you think they'll publish me? maybe i'll also recycle that idea of hating humans and of wishing the earth covered in vines, and men returning to the good ol' days of hunting and gathering...rarrr... when we were in harmony with nature, and the neighbor's TV didn't drive us to homicidal anger
this review, if it seems a little disjointed, I apologize (by the way, this is the kind of syntax Chuck uses sometimes)... it's a mirror held to the work, so what it reflects is just the truth
The thing that i liked is that Chuck used some interesting factoids about alien species colonizing America (starlings, carp, etc.) and driving out or sickening the native species; this stuff was just thrown out, though, meant to shock you into hating modern humans and their careless, cruel ways
Final thought: mental killing, in a novel, is an interesting idea that looks good on paper but doesn't really work; first of all, it's not developed; second, once you remove limits from what people can do, things become boring... killing from a distance, yeah, levitation, yeah, occupying other bodies, yeah, whatever... it' the equivalent of saying, i like everybody, all men and women, regardless, and I can sleep with anyone... really, a story needs limits and a sense of the possible and impossible; otherwise it's just an extended 'what if', like when stoners talk...
Sorry for the ramble. Gonna go have a chicken sandwich.
Customer Rating:
Summary: By the balls
Comment: This book grabbed me by the balls until I was done. I normally take a few months to get through a book, like Choke, but this was about a week. I would have only liked more main characters to die.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unexpected dark humor... how can you resist?
Comment: This my first time reading Palahniuk. To say that he's unique is an understatement. "Lullaby" starts with normal characters but rapidly unfolds into the strangest world imaginable. The pages turn quickly to build a unique place with strange events. Dark humor seeps unexpectedly from aberrant places. The reality presented becomes distorted and twisted, molded into a strange, mystical actuality. At times, as other reviewers mentioned, I felt that I was not be getting the full dramatic effect out of my reading, as if I couldn't grasp what was occurring. Although, by completion, the novel spoke to me with a depth and intensity I have not experienced before. For those who have read the Amazon review, I agree that Chuck Palahniuk expresses potent themes on human control and nature through "Lullaby". I recommend this novel to those seeking impact and an ending you will reflect on.
Thank you for reading,
C.K.
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