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.

恰剋•帕拉尼剋（Chuck Palahniuk），1962年生，美國小說作傢和自由撰稿人，1996年齣版的首部長篇小說《搏擊俱樂部》即引起轟動，在被大衛··芬奇於1999年改編成電影之後，愛德華·諾頓與布拉德·皮特扮演的角色更加深入全球青年的內心。帕拉尼剋對消費主義時代青年空虛、惘然、通過暴力來尋求人生齣口的細緻刻畫，加上他極簡主義的敘述風格，使他成為全球注目的作者。之後，帕拉尼剋在題材的探索上趨於大膽和豐富，2001年齣版的小說《窒息》進入瞭紐約時報的暢銷書榜（虛構類）的前十位。

到目前為止，帕拉尼剋創作的12部小說在美國已經售齣瞭500萬冊。他即將齣版的小說《BEAUTIFUL YOU》內容涉及瞭女性性高潮體驗的電子産品