From the author of the New York Times bestseller Choke and the cult classic Fight Club, a cunningly plotted novel about the ultimate verbal weapon, one that reinvents the apocalyptic thriller for our times.

Carl Streator is a solitary widower and a fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. In the course of this investigation he discovers an ominous thread: the presence at the death scenes of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, all opened to the page where there appears an African chant, or “culling song.” This 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. So he teams up with a real estate broker, one Helen Hoover Boyle–who specializes in selling haunted (or “distressed”) houses (wonderfully high turnover), and who lost a child to the culling song years before–for a cross-country odyssey to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Accompanying them on this road trip are Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, an exquisitely earnest Wiccan, and her sardonic ecoterrorist boyfriend Oyster, who is running a scam involving fake liability claims and business blackmail. Welcome to the new nuclear family.

On one level, Lullaby is a chillingly pertinent parable about the dangers of psychic infection and control in an era of wildly overproliferated information: “Imagine a plague you catch through your ears . . . imagine an idea that occupies your mind like a city.” But it is also a tightly wound thriller with an intriguing premise and a suspenseful plot full of surprising twists and turns. Finally, because it is a Chuck Palahniuk novel, it is a blackly comic tour de force that reinforces his stature as our funniest nihilist and a contemporary seer.

恰克•帕拉尼克（Chuck Palahniuk），1962年生，美国小说作家和自由撰稿人，1996年出版的首部长篇小说《搏击俱乐部》即引起轰动，在被大卫··芬奇于1999年改编成电影之后，爱德华·诺顿与布拉德·皮特扮演的角色更加深入全球青年的内心。帕拉尼克对消费主义时代青年空虚、惘然、通过暴力来寻求人生出口的细致刻画，加上他极简主义的叙述风格，使他成为全球注目的作者。之后，帕拉尼克在题材的探索上趋于大胆和丰富，2001年出版的小说《窒息》进入了纽约时报的畅销书榜（虚构类）的前十位。

到目前为止，帕拉尼克创作的12部小说在美国已经售出了500万册。他即将出版的小说《BEAUTIFUL YOU》内容涉及了女性性高潮体验的电子产品