I enjoyed this book, but not as much as i thought i would. It is definitely classic palahniuk where the description on the back has you thinking the story will be about one thing but it becomes a commentary on something else entirely. A well crafted story that would benefit from a re-read because of the twist ending.

A reporter finds that people are singing the same lullaby to their children and the next day wake up to find their child has died. The culling song is responsible. Carl (a reporter) has now made it his mission to destroy every known copy before things get any worse.

Weird, unexpected, and all around great read. Hooked until the very last page.

So like all Chuck Palahniuk books, Lullaby hooks me and gets me jazzed right at the start. It feels like sitting in a bar with the scruffy, fat guy with the greasy hair and the ratty jeans who has a brain that I didn't expect, and I listen to him riff all night about trivial stories of trivial things that add up to something profound.

I get this feeling and I want to listen to the guy fill me up with profundity. It's the same with Lullaby. I start reading Palahniuk, and I have to keep reading.

But then somewhere along the way -- as with most Palahniuk books since Survivor -- the fat guy goes to take a whiz and my stool is taken by Palahniuk himself. Chuck's sitting there pontificating, and suddenly it's not compelling. It's just annoying. Picture watching Chuck m**turbating over the dead and stinking corpse of Fight Club, trying to squeeze out some seed of anything that isn't a caricatured derivative of his own creative juices and you can picture how I feel midway through Lullaby.

But I continue because I am a masochist. And because the hint of Chuck's genius, which sowed the seed of Fincher's greater genius, is a whisper that I long to hear burst into full resounding song. I want to feel my atoms scattered to the wind by a spell as powerful as the "culling song," and I feel Chuck P's got it in him. So I enjoy the pain, sufferingly, and I hope for better than the whimper I've come to expect.

Lullaby surprises me in the end. In the end, it's not a whimper. It's clever. It's got a nice balance with the rest of the tale. It makes me smirk. But it isn't a roar either. It's not that maelstrom of creativity I have been desiring, so I am let down again. I wish Lullaby had been a short story because it could have taken it's place beside the Secret Sharer or Snow of Kilimanjaro as one of the great works of literature. Instead it is mediocre with some brilliant bits that are all Palahniuk.

And I'll go through this all over again with Pygmy.

I absolutely LOVE this book. It really makes you contemplate and review your own morals in life! :)