'Lullaby'Chuck Palahniuk

Doubleday Publishing

Grade: A+

Imagine that a person could kill someone by simply thinking of them. Think of a song that would cause instant death to anyone and everyone who hears it. This scenario sets the basis of Chuck Palahniuk's new novel, "Lullaby," a chilling tale about a reporter who stumbles upon an ancient African chant, or "culling song," that is lethal when spoken, or even thought, in someone's direction.

This is Palahniuk's fifth novel, and easily his best, showing off a new maturity in his writing that was lacking in his previous novels.

Palahniuk first became recognized after David Fincher turned his first novel, "Fight Club," into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Since then, he has published four more books, he has been offered even more movie deals and has been thrust increasingly into the spotlight.

Palahniuk called "Lullaby" his first foray into horror writing, and while it lacks the typical touchstones of the genre, such as monsters or huge bloody massacres, in many ways it is scarier than most conventional horror writing.

In "Lullaby," Palahniuk has spun a tale of a song so deadly that it has the power to kill instantly, yet so seemingly benign that it has been published in a book for poems and nursery rhymes meant for parents to read to their children. His book tracks the desperate efforts of two men and two women to destroy the song before it kills again.

In Palahniuk's world, nothing is as it seems. Our protagonist and narrator is Carl Streator, a widower and reporter investigating occurrences of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. He discovers the culling song present at every instance in which a child has died painlessly and without any marks, and decides to test his theory that the song is responsible for these deaths by reading it to his editor. Sure enough, his editor is found dead several days later. The song is now lodged in his memory, and he finds himself killing almost, against his will, his editor, people who get in his way on the street and his noisy neighbor upstairs.

He teams up with Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who specializes in haunted or "distressed" houses and is obsessed with jewelry; her Wiccan secretary Mona, and Mona's sardonic; ecoterrorist boyfriend, Oyster. With their new version of the nuclear family (Oyster takes to calling Helen and Carl "Mom" and "Dad"), they set out across the United States to find all the copies of the songs and destroy them, and to find the grimoire, or spell book, that originally contained the culling song.

The novel is written in chilling and stark prose, narrated from Carl Streator's point of view, and written in meandering first person. Normal narrative is boosted by Streator's tendency to think like a reporter, setting the scene with details about the way things smell or feel. Streator spends much of the novel contemplating the power of the culling song and its implications for a society he loathes. "Imagine a plague you could catch through your ears," he muses. "Imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city."

Palahniuk's dark humor and sinister critique of modern urban life makes up the heartbeat of the novel as it twists, turns and unfolds to reveal a web much more tangled than it first appears. Streator struggles to keep his urge to kill in check by counting to distract himself, which soon becomes the novel's ominous chorus: "And I'm counting 578, counting 579, counting 580 . . ."

In "Lullaby," Palahniuk has found the perfect balance of the classic horror novel and his own unique style of writing and thinking. The novel will keep you guessing the whole way through, and it will leave you in a place where you never thought you would be.

The moment you think you know what's going to happen, Palahniuk changes gears on you completely, steering you left instead of right, forcing you up instead of down.

And Palahniuk's writing remains as provocative as ever; like a five-star meal it will leave you feeling full and heavy, but you can't seem to stop reading, no matter how hard you may try. "Lullaby" is a modern near-masterpiece, and, despite its title, its charms will certainly not lull you to sleep.