In addition to tracking down and destroying any copy of the rhyme, the foursome hope to find a grimoire, a hypothesized spellbook which also contains the rhyme. Carl must not only deal with the dangers of the rhyme, but with the risk of it falling into the hands of Oyster, who may want to use it for sinister purposes. They are joined by Helen's hippie assistant, Mona 'Mulberry' Sabbat, and Mona's boyfriend, a nihilistic environmentalist and vegan named Oyster. The two of them decide to go on a road trip across the country to find all remaining copies of the book and destroy the page containing the rhyme. While she is unable to help him stop using the rhyme, she is willing to help him stop anyone else from being able to use it again.

Carl unintentionally memorizes it and semi-voluntarily becomes a serial killer who makes people die over minor annoyances.Ĭarl turns to Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who has also found the rhyme in the same book and knows of its destructive power. Because of the stress of Carl's life, the deadly rhyme becomes unusually powerful, allowing him to kill by only thinking the poem. As Carl learns, the rhyme has the power to kill anyone to whom it is spoken. In every case, the book was open to a page that contained the culling song. During his investigations into other SIDS cases, he finds that a copy of the book was at the scene of each death. Carl discovers that his wife and child had died immediately after he read them a 'culling song', or African chant, from the book Poems and Rhymes Around the World.

Newspaper reporter Carl Streator has been assigned to write articles on a series of cases of sudden infant death syndrome, from which his own child had died. It won the 2003 Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, and was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel in 2002. Lullaby is a horror- satire novel by American author Chuck Palahniuk, published in 2002.

Lullaby book chuck palahniuk