"Lullaby", is thought provoking at a minimum, and will take you to areas of conduct that are still among some subjects that virtually all will consider taboo. An example is Necrophilia which I think will make most people feel they are reading material that will cause varying degrees of discomfort. The entire book is meant to press the darkest buttons inside of readers, Mr. Palahniuk will venture wherever he decides his story needs to go, he offers no respite, no safe haven. Whether you like this style or not I think it is refreshing to find an author that will go in to the darkest areas of human nature, not to be puerile or exploitative, rather to utilize material that is a valid piece of his tale. He is not afraid of offending, or perhaps he is just completely honest, he writes what he needs to write, if some are put off and he sells less books, so be it. The man is not commercial.

Placing topic aside for a moment and turning to style, I find this writer's work to be original in how he presents detail. Colors play a large part in this book, so when he needs to use green it becomes much more than simply green. He describes the green that appears on the felt of a pool table, but only when the red number 3 ball is upon the felt, as opposed to the yellow number 1. Or green is not lime but rather like the color of key lime pie, not avocado but avocado bisque topped with a thin sliver of lemon. This level of description is not meant as sleight of hand or an effort to fill space; it makes the reading incredibly rich, or perhaps lush

Mr. Palahniuk is not for everyone but if you like stepping away from what you usually read, and take a bit of a risk, you may be pleasantly surprised and appropriately rewarded. This writer follows only his own path.


Typical Palahniuk   September 17, 2002
 24 out of 33 found this review helpful

Palahniuk is either a genius or a very bad writer, and unfortunately it's not always easy to tell immediately. What I think he is, though, is a PoMo writer wannabe who's a closet sell-out; someone who's sitting astride the fence of art and entertainment, trying to decide what he prefers. He made his first hit with Fight Club and has been riding on a similar formula every since. Five books later, he still hasn't produced anything fresh or new. He reminds me of the episode of The Simpsons when Homer becomes the newest hot artist in town after his failed attempt to build a grill was hailed as a piece of art; and he tries to repeat the same formula repeatedly because that's all he knew how to do. Fortunately, Homer does create something of great scope by the end of the episode, and perhaps Palahniuk is aiming for that great breakthrough as well.

For those who expected this to be a horror fiction, you may be disappointed. There is a lullaby. You hear it, you die. And a reporter is out to investigated the phenomenon. Anyone expected a further Koji Suzuki exploit would not find any more similarities, for Lullaby is populated with your typical Palahniuk characters: eccentrics, loners, people who have bad jobs, or at least bad bosses, and people who's out to inject their own dose of chaos into a villainized order.

In Lullaby, Palahniuk makes yet another assault on the mass media, although he seems to also probe the hypocrisy of those crying out against the mass media as well. For at least all the characters, from the journalist to the ecoterrorist, all seem to be hypocrites of sorts. They are not really as interested in overthrowing the system as they are in ruling it in their own image.

Palahniuk's depiction of the media as "noise" crowding out thought-processes is far from original. It recalls the book Age of Propaganda by Pratkanis and Aronson, that also depicts the strategies of all those who use the media in attempts to shape our thinking. Of course, readers of Lullaby may be immune or at least aware of such attempts, but the reality is that the majority of people buy into this "noise" as perpetuated by the media, so much so that any prolonged instance of silence is deemed uncomfortable. Our daily lives are so inundated by noise from all sources (especially if you live in New York City) that it's sometimes impossible to think. And soon we are no longer able to think without noise.


That is, I believe, Palahniuk's thesis. For the cursed lullaby presents a true dilemma. It's hard enough to stop printed copies of things to circulate, how much more difficult would it be if such a curse was filtered through all means of the media? We would have to crowd out all noise, and be ruled by the reserve dictatorship of silence, and is that what we really want? In the end, Palahniuk doesn't really offer an answer. Perhaps he only wants us to be aware of the dominance of noise in our lives, and for us to tread a careful balance between the dichotomies of noise and silence, altruism and hypocrisy, and to question everything we hear, regardless of whether we agree with the message or not.


He's got one book in him -- and he just wrote the fifth.   July 28, 2003
 23 out of 34 found this review helpful

Chuck Palahniuk freely admits that he wrote this book in three weeks. As in twenty-one days. As in 504 hours. So it took me approximately 1/504th of the time (about an hour) to choke down this sugary litle trifle that he took in the entire "process" of "crafting" it. Isn't there something wrong with that?

The details (as he would say) about Mr. Palahniuk are that he's lazy, out of ideas, and coasting on the success of one really good book. That book was Fight Club, an achievement that I can't help but believe will someday be upheld as a minor fin de siecle 20th century classic. I've read 'em all faithfully since then, and have been consistently disappointed by how completely unwilling he has been to explore *any* new terrain. So if you were thinking about reading this or any other of Mr. Palahniuk's work, here's a quick guide to all of his past and future works:

1) A quirky, undersexed protaganist will be dragged through a series of satirical, increasingly ridiculous events at the behest of an all-knowing alter ego.

2) Said alter ego will be very powerful, with some almost supernatural character traits.

3) At least one (usually more) of the characters in each book will earn something approximating a living by doing something impossibly clever and startingly unethical: marketing haunted houses, making soap from human fat, garnering sympathy by pretending to choke in expensive restaraunts, becoming a mushy new age messiah, strategically blackmailing companies with threats of class action suits, cruising self-help or sex-addiction or survivors groups, etc.

3) Short, clipped sentences. Like a diary. Or something. I guess. Hemingway it's not.

4) Bite-sized chapters. Many of Mr. Palahniuk's readers aren't quite ready for existential weight of 'big kid' books--they get nervous when faced with narrative points that might take longer than ten pages to develop.

5) Flagrant showing-off of the author's "intensive" (i.e., he read a 'fun facts about _____' book at the local library the week before he started writing) research into a specific subject. While these facts make a runny mortar for the fragments of narrative, character, and emotion that he's trying to slap together, the reader will come away knowing more about, say, homemade explosives, cleaning techniques, reconstructive surgery, soapmaking, the human anatomy, witchcraft, serial killers, the history of silk flowers, sex change operations, ecological crises, etc. etc.

5) Deep Stuff will be indexed, sound-bitten, and briefly referenced from time to time. You may be shocked and forever changed to learn, for example, that we are constantly bombarded by the corrupting influence of a highly commercialized media industry. Or that Americans place a high priority on physical appearance. Or that men are being slowly feminized by a culture that is needing them less than ever. Or that we are wreaking havoc on our natural environment and torturing animals before we eat them without ever stopping to consider the consequences of our acts. If any or all of these ideas are completely new to you, you will *love* Mr. Palahniuk's fresh insights into postmodern life. The rest of us already had these insights sophomore year during a series of keggers in Mike Truflowski's backyard.

6) After about 150 pages of what the author seems to consider "momentum," each book ends with a silly, overwrought denouement: typically a larger-than-life showdown with the alter ego/villain du jour in some way. Then a quick, clean resolution.

7) There's more, but I'm getting depressed just thinking about them. And how publishable this guy's formula really seems to be.

That's pretty much the Chuck Palahniuk experience. Lullaby is easily his worst yet, but it does demonstrate his template more openly than any of his previous work. (The dead bird on the cover also provides a helpful visual representation.) Its only conceivable value to anyone might be the service it provides to future lit majors in their discussions of early 20th century pop writers.

It is worth nothing that this is great beach reading, however. Since most people could easily read his entire oeuvre in two days, it might fit nicely into a weekend at the shore. There are worse ways to switch your brain off. Maybe.


When Great Books Go Bad   October 6, 2002
 18 out of 28 found this review helpful

Lullaby is a very strange read indeed. The concept is highly original and intelligent and yet, in the end, you never really care for any of it. This is one of those books that has a great concept but, because of its poor execution, you can't ever fully enjoy the ride.

Carl wakes up one morning to find his wife and six-month old daughter dead in their beds. They died in their sleep for no apparent reason. Now, twenty years later, Carl is a journalist. He comes upon a case where babies all over the country are dying of 'crib deaths', which means that their deaths cannot be explained. He traces these deaths back to a lullaby of African origin that has the power to kill people. Now that Carl has this power in his hands, he soons becomes a killing machine, whether he wants it or not.

And of course, like in all of Palahniuk's novels, Carl meets a woman who looks normal and sane on the outside but who is everything but. Helen has also lost her family because of the culling song. They embark on a journey to destroy all of the existing copies of the song so that innocent people will stop dying. But they also want to destory the song so that they'll be the only ones to hold the power over life and death.

There is a very unnecessary withcraft subplot, but that aside, Lullaby is a great story that should have fully entertained me. Instead, I often found myself bored with it. Palahniuk needs to stop trying to be so self-analytical and sarcastic all the time. His style is getting a little old. I like the way he can look at the real world and ridicule it, but sometimes, less is more. And in this case, I would have taken less of that world analysis and more of the plot.

Palahnuik is supposedly the voice of today's generation. And I can see why. His writing is witty and post-modern and often darkly funny. But without any characters you can ever really care for, and without enough plot to sustain a whole novel, Lullaby is a failed attempt at greatness.


Trite, forgettable and boring in the guise of profundity   September 18, 2002
 16 out of 29 found this review helpful

If you liked Survivor, Fight Club, and Choke, just savor the feeling of a good re-read. Those books were terrific, but this is trendy rehash--in fact, it's sloppily written, just POOR. And I'm sorry--I really WANTED it to be great, as I'd looked forward to it for months. But not this time. Palahniuk is just repeating himself now, and it's sad, really, what his work is becoming.