Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

If you don't mind the risky, the disgusting, the weird, the confusing and the just plain strange then this brilliant book is probably right up your alley. Some of you may recognise the author as the writer of the infamous Fight Club which was made into a movie (and a brilliant movie) starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Lullaby follows the same literary style but on a completely different sort of genre. I suppose you would call it a horror-satire-thriller-murder sort of thing but with Palahniuk who really knows to be honest.
It details the story of an investigative journalist, Carl Streator, who, when looking into Sudden Infant Death Syndrome discovers that every victim of it has been read the same poem from the same book before they have died. It also just so happens that he killed his wife and daughter the same way two years earlier. His only friend, a coroner becomes aware of the poem and starts killing people then having sex with their dead bodies. He meets Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who resells haunted houses, and they decide they need to get rid of all the books. So begins a race against time, power, human emotion and wiccan nudists (always got to watch out for those wiccan nudists).
If there is one thing Palahniuk is great at it's imagery, which perhaps explains why Fight Club translated so well into a film, his great use of colours and his wonderful eye for detail creates a picture in your mind straight away. The pain of losing a child and the horror/parody of what happens next definitely kept me reading this book.
He is one of those authors who just has work that flows so brilliantly and analyses so insightfully, a huge analysis of Lullaby was the media-fueled world in which we all live and how having the power to control life or death can change someone, and can change all those people around them. He also has that dry, sarcastic wit which I love and a very dismal attitude towards human nature.
I'm not saying much about this book because I don't want to give much away, I think it really needs to be discovered itself.
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