Lullaby - Chuck Palahniuk
Lullaby is about the power of words. It's about mysterious deaths, profiting from tragedy, eco-terrorism, anti-advertising. Mr. Streator discovers an ancient culling song, a "lullaby" that puts people to sleep for good. Then he embarks on a quest to rid the world of the song, but several people want to use the song for various other reasons.
This is the first of Palahniuk's books I've read, and he has an interesting writing style. The book doesn't progress in chronological order, but jumps between past and present, gradually filling in gaps. It's the sort of book where I found myself flipping back and forth often, with the "Oh, that's what happened" realizations. It took a little getting used to the way he records dialogue, but it seemed to work well.
It's a fascinating and creepy book. Along the way various characters spout all sorts of theories. Furniture is the ghosts of wealthy people; all this stuff they accumulated lives on after all the effort they spend to acquire it. People are a plague on the earth; what we think of as "nature" is the result of human-caused ecological disasters. The way to forget about the big picture is to lose yourself in the details. Every character has an agenda, and a whole lot of trivia to support it—that part reminded me of "Flight Club" (I've seen the movie, haven't read the book).
It was a good read—I may check out some of his other novels later on.
Fed to jhliu's brain | July 28, 2003
