Chuck Palahniuk's darkly comic and rhythmically written "Lullaby"
turns the old nursery rhyme "sticks and stones will break my bones, but
words will never hurt me" on its head.

The lullaby of the title is an ancient African culling song. Traditionally it
was used to give a painless death to the old or the infirmed. A greedy
bookseller has collected the culling song, along with many other poems
considered public domain, in a collection entitled "Poem & Rhymes
from Around the World."

Reporter Carl Streator is working on a crib death assignment
for his newpaper when he begins to suspect that the song
on page 27 of the collection may have something to do
with the mysterious deaths of several babies.

Palahniuk gives Streator's narration the classic reporters'
"just the facts Ma'am" voice, but he is anything but
straightforward. He has a fetishistic, deeply subversive
ritual of meticulously building small models of cites and
neighborhoods. When they are complete, down to the
minute detail, he brutally stomps on them with his bare
right foot. His limp and aching, swollen foot and are
testament to his very private acts of creation and
destruction. Ultimately, Streator's late night ritual is the
central theme of  Palahniuk's fable: power.  

Like his "Fight Club", Palahniuk gives a strong, yet paradoxically hypocritical voice of
anti-consumerism to his characters. Just by living in modern society one is responsible for the death
and misery of a thousand things by the things one buys and how one lives. The young, arrogant
character Oyster recites America's dubious environmental history with venom: indigenous plants
suffocated by cheat grass planted by greedy ranchers, cows forced to stay pregnant to produce milk
until their bones are brittle, starlings taking over bird populations because a settler wanted  a greater
bird diversity. Yet Oyster has his own power play: he places fictitious ads proclaiming possible class
action suits against business in newspapers around the country.

Streator and his "partner", the hard-as-diamonds Helen Hoover Boyle, who also knows the words
of the culling song, hunt down all copies of deadly song in an attempt to prevent others from
reading it unwittingly. If they do not find all of the copies the world will be overtaken by a plague
one catches through the ears. Or are the pair simply serial killers who want to prevent others from
having a piece of their power?

"Lullaby" is a creepy fable full of grief, mystery, fear and disturbingly funny moments. Like "Fight
Club" there is a seductive style of repetition and rhyming in Palahniuk's writing. "Lullaby" reads like
a song on many pages. A song that is a satirical parable of modern life.