The only answer is to find and destroy every copy of the book in the country. As the body count rises, Streator glimpses the potential catastrophe if someone truly malicious finds out about the song. Reporter Carl Streator discovers the song's lethal nature while researching Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, and before he knows it, he's reciting the poem to anyone who bothers him. You can find one on page 27 of Poems and Rhymes from Around the World, an anthology that is sitting on the shelves of libraries across the country, waiting to be picked up by unsuspecting readers. The lyrics of a culling song kill, whether spoken or even just thought. ReviewĮver heard of a culling song? It's a lullaby sung in Africa to give a painless death to the old or infirm. Accompanying them on their 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. Their goal is to remove all copies of the book from libraries, lest this deadly verbal virus spread and wipe out human life. Together they set out on a cross-country odyssey. 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.

In the course of this investigation, he discovers an ominous thread: the presence on the scenes of these deaths of the anthology Poems and Rhymes Around the World, 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. Carl Streator is a solitary widower and fortyish newspaper reporter who is assigned to do a series of articles on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Lullaby book chuck palahniuk