Lullaby

Assigned as a reporter to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Carl Streator makes an extraordinary discovery.

He notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same children’s anthology the night before they died. It’s a “culling song” – an ancient African spell for euthanising sick or old people.

The song turns out to be lethal when spoken or even thought in anyone’s direction – and once it lodges in Streator’s brain he finds himself becoming an involuntary serial killer.

Teaming up with Helen, a woman who twenty years before had accidentally killed her own child with the same poem, he embarks on a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly virus spread and wipe out human life.

On one level Lullaby is a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection in an era of wildly over-proliferated information.

But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a gripping plot full of surprising twists and turns. Finally, because this is a book by Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club, Survivor and Choke, it is a blackly comic tour de force that reinforces his stature as modern fiction’s funniest nihilist and contemporary seer.