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Lullaby  By  cover art

Lullaby

By: Chuck Palahniuk
Narrated by: Richard Poe
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Publisher's summary

New York Times best-selling author of Fight Club, which was adapted into a major motion picture, Chuck Palahniuk offers a haunting tale. Winner of the Northwest Booksellers Association Award, Palahniuk is one of the rare literary geniuses who has been able to bridge the gap between a cult following and commercial success.

Carl Streator, a 40-something widower and newspaper reporter, has lived a reclusive life since the death of his wife. His latest assignment is to write a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In doing so, he discovers that there is an underlying commonality in the deaths. A children's book, Poems and Rhymes Around the World, containing an African Death chant, is found at the scene of the cases he investigates. Having read the chant aloud, he quickly realizes the lethal power of the words. As he fights against its powerful grip, which has turned him into a serial killer, he enlists the aid of some eccentric compatriots who vow to rid every library and bookstore of the deadly text before further lives are jeopardized. But what begins as a crusade to save lives soon becomes the ultimate game of cat and mouse, as they uncover the truth about the rhyme and are hunted by the force holding Streator captive.

Newsday hails Palahniuk as "one of the freshest, most intriguing voices to appear in a long time." Richard Poe's powerful narration expertly captures every tormented detail of this paranormal thriller.

©2002 Chuck Palahniuk (P)2002 Recorded Books, LLC

Critic reviews

"Hilarious satire." (Publishers Weekly)
"Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you'd expect from Palahniuk." (Kirkus Reviews)
"In his last novel, Choke, Palahniuk proved he could write a best seller without sacrificing his trademark biting satire. And in Lullaby, he manages an even more impressive feat by showing himself capable of tenderness as well as outrage." (Booklist)
"This is vintage Palahniuk: weird, creepy, twisted, upsetting, and ultimately a great read for anyone who wants to be scared for pleasure." (Library Journal)

What listeners say about Lullaby

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different

strange but good. he has a unique style that's for sure. I would recommend if you have the stomach for gory

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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def not as dark

its def worth a read. it's not as dark as say make something up or fightclub but if you like magic I'd say you will enjoy it

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

don't bother

Slow start. thought it would get better, but it just got worse. i finished it, but that was hard.

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Great!

I love the voice of the reader and one of my favorite books of all time!

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  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

It was hard to follow what was going on.

I think this is one of those weird cases in which the audio version is no match for the written version. Apparently the author uses a time framing writing that is only discernible by the use of italic text in the book. This makes you get lost in the audio

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

A philosophical giant

Palahinuik in true form. The characters are all gritty and real, some of them you love, and some of them you just want to read the culling song to yourself. I really enjoyed the depth of uncomfortable philosophy involved. Palahinuik brings forth grand ideas and their ugly consequences. He puts the microscope of what is truly wrong, and what it is truly right, using parallels that seem odd but in a way couldn’t be explained any other way. (My personal favorite: “Maybe we don’t go to hell for the things we do, we go to Hell for the things we didn’t do”

The only reason I didn’t give this story 5 stars, however, is because with all the focus on philosophy, the story gets put a little by the wayside. It moved at a slow pace at times, and could even be a bit predictable. This is my third Palahinuik book, and compared to Fight Club, which I read cover to cover in a single day, and Invisible Monsters, this just failed to grab me all the way through. The third act starts to tie all the loose ends together, and then just ends abruptly. Maybe it keeps the magic, maybe it’s supposed to leave you asking questions, I’m not Palahinuik so I will never know. What I do know is I felt a bit unfulfilled at the ending.

All that being said, I really enjoyed this book, Richard Poe deserves a lot of credit for bringing Carl and the rest of the world to life. If You are a fan of the uncomfortable, meaty, and gritty style of Palahinuik, I 100% suggest this book to you

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great narration

interesting, thought-provoking, lewd, and hilarious. narrator was perfect.

there is a crowdfunding thing going on where fans are donating to make this book a movie. it is currently in pre-production with 400 something thousand dollars raised. I hope you'll consider throwing some cash to this holy cause of excellence.

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  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

So-So

I am a huge Palahniuk fan and this was my first time listening to one of his stories on audiobook. I found it to be difficult to follow along and that the overall story was not that interesting. The narration was great though.

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    5 out of 5 stars

Challenging, Subtle, & Amazing

"There are worse things you can do to the people you love then kill them."

Carl Streiter, Lullaby's first-person narrator, says these words to himself over and over again throughout the novel as he comforts the parents whose children have died of SIDS. And, to me, the unsettlingly quiet moment when you realize what he really means is one of the most horrific in the novel. To use Carl's words, the thought of it "occupies my mind the way an army does a city." In this novel, what doesn't immediately sink in settles overtime when you let yourself be immersed in Carl's (Palahniuk's) disquieting world. This novel is full of the kinds of things that might baffle you when you listen/read it at first, but that will later wake you up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, in a moment of unsettled understanding. I can’t tell you how my times I found myself suddenly awake, staring at my ceiling, and murmuring “oh…my…God” to myself while I was reading this book.

By the way, I would not recommend listening to this book to go to sleep. This is real horror.

Because its real horror, its very challenging. It’s not an easy listen, neither intellectually or emotionally-- not, I think, if you consume it with the kind of full attention that I think its meant to be consumed with. It makes you think, and it makes you feel. A lot.

I laughed (lol— “Plucky?”). I cried. I gagged. I was chilled. I was touched. And by the end, I couldn’t wait to read more work by this author.

Richard Poe’s performance is excellent. And I find Palahniuk’s style to be immensely engaging. You can’t really space off for more than a few seconds with this, because it’s the kind of writing that can often be propelled by a single sentence— which is one of the things I love about it (he’s similar to Atwood in that way).

Looking through these reviews, I see that some people don’t like some of the imagery in the book (“crude” appears more than a few times; and a positive review said “you need a strong stomach”). It’s important to remember that this is a horror satire-- it's not a thriller (or suspense). And horror is bloody and disgusting and uncomfortable and often nihilistic. That isn't to say that Lullaby is a slasher by any means. The sort of body horror moments that happen are either given a lot of gravity or invested with a lot of symbolic meaning. In fact, I think the fact that the horror is so meaningful its one reason why the discomfort and disgust reaction is so strong. We don't like to think about what it means when we witness awful things like this. Which is why you might be able to watch a man in a hockey mask hunt down and stab countless screaming teenagers, but you find yourself physically turning away from the injury that Carl deals with in this novel.

I think something else that people are finding uncomfortable is the fact that they can’t wholly identify with Carl. Without giving too much away— I’m betting that it's difficult for many readers to entirely buy into the story Carl tells about the morning after his personal experience with the lullaby. But, I don’t think you’re (necessarily) supposed to be able to wholly sympathize with Carl-- in fact, I think Palahniuk put that moment in the specific place that he did for a reason. (You could say that of the whole book. When I read this, I got the impression that I had put my trust in the hands of a storyteller who had painstakingly designed every detail down to each period or paragraph break.)

What I mean to say is that Palahniuk is one of those writers that does not hold readers hands. He is masterful when it comes to manipulating tone and pace, and capturing voice. In this book, anyway, he does not at all interject his own voice in order to try to give you the conventional hints about how to feel about particular characters and events. To put it another way, Palahniuk puts you in Carl’s head, and your job, as the reader, is to figure out what YOU think about that. He doesn’t tell you Carl is great or Carl is awful. And I think that, by the end of the story, he gives you enough peeks into Carl’s head to let you form an interpretation of Carl and everything that he experiences for yourself.

I would recommend this book to anyone looking for a good challenge. Something that makes you think and feel deeply, and something that will stick with you long after you're done.

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Rough but amazing

Performance is top notch. Reminds me of Frank Muller. Story is hard, especially if you’re a parent, but gripping, and filled with everything I expect from Palahniuk.

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