Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk

Carl Streator is a reporter investigating Sudden Infant Death Syndrome for a soft-news feature. After responding to several calls with paramedics, he notices that all the dead children were read the same poem from the same library book the night before they died. It's a 'culling song' - an ancient African spell for euthanizing sick or old people. Researching it, he meets a woman who killed her own child with it accidentally. He himself accidentally killed his own wife and child with the same poem twenty years earlier. Together, the man and the woman must find and destroy all copies of this book, and try not to kill every rude sonofabitch that gets in their way. Lullaby is a comedy/drama/tragedy. In that order. It may also be Chuck Palahniuk's best book yet.

I'm counting one, counting two, counting thr...I can't freaking finish...
I just couldn't do it. I thought that the idea was really amazing and I was hooked at the beginning, but then it starting getting so repetitious that I found myself skipping over full sections. Aside from that the characters were all completely insufferable. I don't think I liked a single character in the entire book! I just couldn't finish it.

This is a weird, racy little black comedy with supernatural elements and characters that are repulsive yet entertaining in various ways. It's a road trip story that moves very fast; not much time is wasted on involved backstory or character development. There's a cynical rather than sentimental approach to the premise, which certainly could have incited more empathy given the tragedies involved.

I see similarities between Lullaby and Fight Club. There's the antisocial/sociopathic characters, the social commentary, and the identity-related plot twists. With Fight Club, I was more engaged and involved with the narrator. The rebellion against consumer culture and living for a meaningless career, for instance, gave Fight Club meaning for me. Lullaby spends a lot of time on noise pollution, which is interesting but doesn't resonate with me quite as much.