Novel: Lullaby

Overview
Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby follows Carl Streator, a weary newspaper reporter assigned to investigate a rash of sudden infant death cases. He discovers a terrifying link: at each home, a children’s anthology lies open to the same African “culling song,” a lullaby that kills anyone who hears it, so potent that merely thinking the words can halt a heartbeat. Once Carl accidentally memorizes the rhyme, he becomes a walking weapon, forced to police his own thoughts while deciding what to do with lethal knowledge in a noisy, indifferent world.

Plot
While visiting grieving families, Carl meets Helen Hoover Boyle, a glamorous real estate agent notorious for flipping haunted houses. Helen knows the culling song too; her business model is to sell stigmatized properties over and over, monetizing tragedy and belief. Together, they resolve to prevent further deaths by tracking down and destroying every copy of the children’s book that reprints the spell. Joining them are Helen’s assistant, the swaggering eco-activist who calls himself Oyster, and his girlfriend Mona, a young witch eager to treat the world as a laboratory for ritual power.

The quartet embarks on a cross-country purge, raiding libraries and used bookstores to tear out the culling song’s page and torch it in bathrooms and parking lots. As the group narrows in on the source, a centuries-old grimoire that contains the original lullaby and a host of other spells, their mission frays under pressure. Carl, already haunted by the deaths of his wife and child and the suspicion that he once read the lullaby without understanding its force, finds his self-control slipping. The ease of killing by thought makes every irritation, a loudmouth on the radio, an aggressive driver, a smug authority, an instant temptation. Helen keeps secrets of her own, using spells for beauty and protection and nursing a private grief she refuses to relinquish.

When they finally obtain the grimoire, the book’s other incantations prove as dangerous as the lullaby. Love charms, binding rituals, and body-transfer spells dangle shortcuts to power and escape. Oyster and Mona seize their chance, stealing the grimoire to advance a radical crusade: wield the culling song against polluters, politicians, and crowds, pruning humanity to “save” the planet. Carl and Helen give chase across interstates, motels, and real estate showings that double as séances, their partnership curdling into distrust as the line blurs between using the spell for protection and using it to dominate.

Themes and Style
Lullaby is a horror road novel about the weaponization of language and the contagion of media. The culling song functions like a viral meme and a loaded gun, spreading through print and memory, dramatizing how casual consumption turns deadly when words carry real force. Palahniuk skewers commodification, hauntings packaged as assets, grief turned into price points, while staging arguments over environmentalism, personal responsibility, and the moral calculus of selective killing. Refrains, short punchy chapters, and recurring taglines work like incantations, imbuing the prose with the rhythmic hypnosis of the very lullaby the characters fear.

Climax and Aftermath
The pursuit ends not with the spell’s erasure but with its dispersion. Confrontations splinter the group and unleash the grimoire’s body-switching magic, leaving identities unmoored from appearances. Oyster escapes with knowledge enough to remain a threat. Carl and Helen survive in compromised forms, forced to reckon with who they have become after using language as a weapon and treating people as vessels. The last pages refuse neat closure: the lullaby cannot be unlearned, the world remains loud, and the characters’ new skins cannot absolve their choices. The novel leaves a lingering dread that in a culture saturated with messages, the deadliest ones are the easiest to remember.