May 3, 2011

#59 - "Lullaby" by Chuck Palahniuk


Title: Lullaby
Author: Chuck Palahniuk

Summary:
Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or “culling song.” This song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone's direction–and once it lodges in Streator's brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle–who specializes in selling haunted (or “distressed”) houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before–for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.

My rating: 4 of 5

My thoughts on the book:
Where do I start? I have to say that I was surprised by this book. I expected something quite different, but not this, but it was good. It was definitely weird, also sad, yet unexpectedly funny at times, & with lots of twists & turns. Although it's short book - a little over 200 pages, I have to admit that it needed time for me to get through it. I just got confused with some of the chapters here and there, but after finishing the book, they weren't confusing anymore ;) If you love reading something different, than I recommend this book, although I think it's not for everyone. What I'll say is that I'm already looking forward to re-reading it, although of course that won't be soon, but I think that I'll enjoy it even more when I'll be reading it again.

Challenges:

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