Lullaby

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Have you ever been a room where someone is watching TV, and someone is playing a computer game, and someone else is talking to someone else, and the phone is ringing, and the dog is barking, and micro-wave is dinging, and a baby is crying, and you just want to stand on a chair and scream at the top of you lungs to just "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP"!  Well that is how Lullaby is but in literary form.  And the funny thing is...  I kinda loved it!!  I mean the big kind of love where you can't stop talking about it, you wanna buy it in hardback, you want to sleep with it under your pillow, and you want everyone else to love it just as hard as you do.  I just have to say, Chuck Palahniuk, where have you been all my life??  I think most of us would recognize Chuck Palahniuk's work from Fight Club which is one of my favorite movies of all time (though I haven't read the book yet), and if you can picture the darkness of Fight Club you can understand the darkness of Lullaby.  The humor is DARK, and DRY, and the story is DISTURBING, and the prose are GRUESOME, but even so this book is hysterical (even though sometimes you feel like it is inappropriate to laugh, and you might feel the need to take a shower after reading it), and it really gets you thinking about life and death.  If you have a weak stomach move on, you won't want to digest this book.  But if you are up for some mind Olympics, and some amazing writing dive right in please!

So in this book we meet Carl Streator, investigative journalist extraodinaire.  He prides himself on not missing the details when he is on an assignment and that is how he gets himself into the mess in this story.  Carl is assigned a 5 part article on SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), he heads out to a families house that sadly have just lost their little one to this strange Syndrome.  While Carl is looking over the nursery he notes a library book on the bedside table opened to a nursery rhyme (a culling song) on page 27.  On the second house call to a victim of SIDS he notices the same library book, and on and on it goes.  So he reads the rhyme on the page and recites it to his editor who dies.  Now Carl is off on a wild goose chase through the U.S. (with 2 Wiccans {Mona & Oyster}, and an eccentric real estate agent that sells haunted houses{Helen Hoover Boyle}) to find the remaining copies of this book and destroy them.  The only thing is, that every time Carl recites the Culling Song (even in his head) someone dies.  That is all I'm gonna say.  There is SOOOOOOO much more to this book than the little bit I have just mentioned.  There is Carl's story, Helen's Story, Mona and Oysters story, the characters fight for power, twists, turns, dead ends, death, carnage, cell phone calls, talking cows, flying Virgins, more twists, more turns, more dead ends, and can you tell why I gave the loud room analogy earlier?

Like I mentioned before, don't read this book if you are easily sick or if you are easily offended.  There is gore and offensiveness a plenty.  But do pick this book up if you want something SUPER different to read.  Or if you want to laugh out loud.  Or if you want to discuss the heck out of it with me!  The only regret I have is that I didn't actually read this book but listened to the Audiobook.  Though the reader Richard Poe was FANTASTIC!  You won't regret reading this little gem, unless of course you do regret it, and then I warned you about the gore.

BOOK vs. MOVIE: There has been some interest in this book for a movie adaption by the director of Fight Club.  There is also a rumor that a Swedish director may pick up the project.  All I can say is that if it is done as well as Fight Club (and remember I haven't read that book yet, so don't judge me for a comparison yet), I would be at the theater to see it.

RATING: 5 Stars

3 more reviews of Lullaby:

I'm A Book Worm

MegaLung

Smitten

Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk {Audo Book}

ISBN 1402524978

6 Disc {3 Hours 29 Minutes}

Read by Richard Poe

If you liked Lullaby then you should read: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote