Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Date of Publication: June 29^th, 2003

Memorable Quotation: “No one wants to admit we’re addicted to music. That’s just not possible. No one’s addicted to music and television and radio. We just need more of it, more channels, a larger screen, more volume. We can’t bear to be without it, but no, nobody’s addicted. We could turn it off anytime we wanted.”

Lasting Impression: Chuck Palahniuk shows the world once again how and why he is a master of his craft in another philosophically crazy rollercoaster of a novel!

Storyline: A

Pace of Story: A

Characters: A+

Ending: A+

Overall: A

When it comes to Chuck Palahniuk, you either love him or hate him; there is no middle ground. (Personally, I love him). The vulgar tone he uses when he exploits the underground knowledge of what we try to stay ignorant to makes it difficult to like him at times, but the way he creates characters full of dreams, emotions, and flaws makes the connection between the characters and the reader seamless, helping the reader turn their dislike of Palahniuk into positive reception.

The main theme of Lullaby is the culling song, a lullaby sung in Africa used to help babies sleep.  Now, the song has become more than a child’s lullaby; it has become deadly, killing not only children but adults as well when someone says or even thinks about the song.  It soon becomes the mission of Carl Streator (a journalist focusing on the mysterious “crib deaths” of babies), Helen Hoover Boyle (a savvy realtor whose specialty are haunted houses), her receptionist, Mona (a young, devout Wiccan), and Mona’s boyfriend, Oyster (an extreme vegan with a hatred for modern culture) to find the poetry books containing the culling song and hopefully prevent the world from a telepathic and verbal apocalypse.

Lullaby is not for the weak-minded or weak-hearted. It is a crazy book, especially towards the end. Let me also say this is NOT for people who have not read anything by Chuck Palahniuk before because there is so much in this novel to be appreciated, to think about after finishing it, that if you make this the first book you read by him, you will not understand what he is talking about and consider him insane.  If you have read a few others by him before reading this one, you will definitely love the unconventional family he creates as well as the metaphors he uses about everyday life. (Although I’m not sure anyone can ever get used to the way he uses his characters to dig into your soul to tell you that you could be someone better.)

A few things disappointed me in this novel. At times, the connections he made between characters or the reasoning behind background information about someone seemed to be a stretch, making the story lose its pace because of the time it took to re-read and ponder what he had said.  The biggest disappointment to me, though, was the two small chapters about Streator and “Sarge” (you will learn about him towards the end of the book).  Palahniuk either should have taken these chapters out or insert them throughout the novel to make it more consistent. It took until the next day for me to realize what those chapters were supposed to be, and I feel greatly disappointed about that because if he were to have done more with them throughout the book, it would have given the novel another dimension.

The ending is beautiful, if not in a very messed-up way that only Palahniuk could pull off. It is very satisfying, though, and raps up everything together so tightly you would think this had all actually happened. Lullaby is certainly another of Palahniuk’s masterpieces due to the way he pushes his readers as well as his characters to contemplate morality, life, and what we are really made of.

~Shelly-Beans