Lullaby

Rating:
Summary: Palahniuk's Best Yet!
Review: Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for capturing the pressures of modern life, and the resulting angst and alienation of the people who inhabit it. To that extent, Lullaby is no different from Choke or Fight Club. This really isn't a twist on the horror story as some of the media reviews have made it out to be.

There's the emotionally scarred main protagonist with a dark past secret waiting to be dredged up who surrounds him or herself with a surrogate family. There's the rants against modernity and consumerism and their resulting compulsions. There's the quest on which the main characters embark that culminates in an anarchic free for all. There's the identity switches between characters. And, of course, there's Palahniuk's wisecracks, smart-[aleck] asides, and spare, almost hard-boiled writing style.

Palahniuk does all this so well, so uniquely, that his fans are not going to be disappointed with Lullaby.

What makes Lullaby different from what has come before, and what makes Lullaby his best novel, is that he seems to tackle his usual themes a bit more thoroughly and directly than he has before. And for the first time, Palahniuk introduces the notion of modern access to information as something to really worry about, rather than accept as something that will liberate society. The device he uses here is an ancient African culling spell. A magical spell that poses as a deadly information virus.

If there is anything that is unsatisfying it's the ending, which in typical Palahniuk fashion, resolves the fate in an anarchic free for all of outlandishness. It seems like Palahniuk plots his novels into dead ends, leaving him no way out to end his novels, and he has to resort to, well, what happens in Lullaby.

But that doesn't make Lullaby an unsatisfying novel. And, in the strange world that Palahniuk's characters inhabit, which is still identifiably the world we live in today, the way Palahniuk unravels it all seems to make the only sense in light of what's come before in the novel.

So far, Palahniuk can do no wrong.

Rating:
Summary: 100% vintage Palahniuk - with a twist
Review: The power of words has no equal. They can inform, inspire, motivate, pacify and entertain. Words can also hurt, deceive, and kill.

Kill?

You know that words have inspired others to kill, but what if words themselves could kill? In "Lullaby", the new novel by Chuck Palahniuk, words have exactly that power.

I'm not going to give anything away, because I want you to read it with no preconceptions or knowledge of the subject matter. If you've already read a review. Too late, but you'll still enjoy it.

Chuck has taken his ablilities in a slightly new (The book is still 100% vintage Palahniuk) with wonderful results.

Highly Recommended

Rating:
Summary: The Deaf Shall Inherit the Earth
Review: I finished this book about an hour and a half ago, so I haven't had the time to fully absorb it. However, these are my initial impressions:
This is a damn funny book. Palahniuk's wit is in full form here, especially in the scene involving the wiccan party.
There is some truly disturbing content here. Especially in the usages found for the "culling song" by characters in the book. The John Nash character is among the most disturbed characters in Palahniuk's writing, and definitely the most evil person in this book.
Plus, there's a Fight Cub reference in here. Look for it.
Not that there aren't some weaknesses. The character of Oyster seems to be little more than a vegan Tyler Durden, and the scene set in Seattle comes directly out of a Tyler Durden fantasy.
But overall, the minor weaknesses do not detract from a great overall reading experience. Highly recommended for all Palahniuk fans. Those uninitiated have been warned.

Rating:
Summary: Trite, forgettable and boring in the guise of profundity
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Truly an original book
Review: I picked up this book on a recent trip to London, enticed by the plot description on the back cover (the British version is in paperback). My only exposure to Chuck Palahniuk before reading this book was the movie "Fight Club." Now I think I need to read the rest of his books. This book was so different from anything I've read before. It so hard to find a unique voice these days. He truly has his own style -- odd, distrubing but not in a gross-out way. An original and thought-provoking look at contemporary American culture, how mindlessly infectious it is. Also very pleasantly surprised at the positive vegetarian connections made -- mind you, primarily by Oyster but good points none-the-less.

Rating:
Summary: SO BREATH-TAKING, IT CAN PUT A TEAR IN YOUR EYE!
Review: This book was amazing. I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys bret easton ellis, palhniuk, welsh, etc.

Rating:
Summary: Typical Palahniuk
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: The Man Cannot Write A Bad Book
Review: Well, I read "Lullaby," and it was spectacular. This is typical of a Palahniuk novel, because his stories all feature extremely amazing characters with equally awesome first-person narrations, twisted and compelling plots, and dark, funny, and always thought-provoking social commentaries. The narrator in this story is reporter Carl Streator, who is assigned to check out multiple cases of SIDs. After a close look into each case, he finds out that the "culling song" has been read to each victim; a culling song is a song or poem read to someone to put them out of their misery. The problem: it kills even if it's recited in your head, and Carl has definitely read it enough to know it in his mind. Further investigation takes him to a woman named Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who sells people houses that are possessed by demons (one of the many funny things about the narration in this one is the descriptions of the houses), her strange friend and secretary, Mona, and Mona's extremely, well, opinionated boyfriend Oyster. Together, the four of them go all over the country looking to destroy every remaining copy of the book that features the culling song, and the story just gets crazier and weirder and more and more exciting as you read. Making you laugh, making you shudder, and making you think, "Lullaby" is a great novel by one of the best writers to date, and you need to check it out.

Rating:
Summary: Don't Look for Depth
Review: The best part about "Lullaby" was the summary inside the front cover. The premise sounds exciting enough: an African culling song can kill with words and the heroes, Helen Boyle and Carl Streator, are out to destroy all copies to redeem them from their previous sins. Seems like something original, occult, and obscure enough to be fresh, right? It isn't.

Palahniuk is a connoisseur of good ideas but can't present them. The author falls back on bad angst, juvenile anti-civilization commentary, and mindless repetition to bludgeon readers into believing that he is a brilliant modern writer. He exploits the fascinating philosophy of nihilism without even offering entertainment in return. His characters are indistinguishable and all speak with the same voice - his. Ultimately they can't express what he wants to say with this book, so he falls back on blatant, preachy, tiresome comments about society which provoke little or no thought. His tone inevitably loses what wit it originally possessed (and let's just say he's no Douglas Adams, either) and deteriorates into self-righteous condescension.

"Lullaby" yearns to be brilliantly avant-garde, artistically misunderstood, and appealing to only a selective, free-thinking minority. Unfortunately, it only manages to be shallow and irritating.

If you can put up with Palahniuk's style, you might enjoy this book. Just don't expect too much.

Rating:
Summary: Good Palahniuk Starter
Review: In a Guardian Online interview, Chuck claimed that this book would be the best book for a Palahniuk novice to enter his world of eco-hippe rhetoric and nihilistic tendencies. Having only read two of his books(This and Fight Club), I enjoyed the socially conscious message that Chuck sends through both the Protagonist and Antagonist of the story. The plot can best be described as surreal. The absurdity of the wiccan lovers and the necrophiliac co-worker and succesful real estate agent all mingling to obtain the source of the culling lullaby is laughable(in a good way). Overall the most powerful impression this book leaves is the affect that we have on the environment, how we willingly rape the land of its natural resources and habitat and slaughter animals for our own self-interests pushed me in the direction of vegetarianism or at least incited me to accept the validity of the vegan lifestyle.

Fun book that Chuck sprinkles with statements of profundity that will take your mind off the crazy store and apply much of what happens to your own life.