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When you pick up a Chuck Palahniuk book you know that you are going to plunge ever-so-briefly into a raging torrent of absurdity, horror so whimsical that you laugh even as you cringe, and insightful looks at contemporary living. It seems a cheap shot to call his work formulaic, but once you've read through 6 or 7 of his books, the pattern emerges and you have a vague idea of what to expect.

It was Lullaby that finally brought this realization home to me. You have the protagonist, a man who seems like the picture of upstanding normality at first glance but who is eventually revealed to have a dark secret hidden in his past. You have the more experienced secondary character who helps to drive the story forward by slowly revealing some answers to the mystery. Then you have the comical minor characters, the latter-day Rosencratz and Guildenstern (or the R2D2 and C3PO if you want to take it that far) if you will, who play an important roll in the advancement of events but who also provide the brilliant moments of macabre hilarity. At some point they will all go on a roadtrip and Palahniuk will ruminate on the state of human existence at the turn of the 21st Century.

And so it goes for Lullaby. Features reporter Carl Streator is assigned to report on crib death for a mid-size Portland newspaper. As he visits site after site of these tragic deaths, he notices the constant appearance of a book of children's poems all laying open to Page 27. It appears that prior to dying the infants had all been read this particular poem. Being the thorough investigative reporter that he is, Streator traces crib deaths in his area back over 20 years until he comes across Helen Hoover Boyle, a Realtor who specializes in selling (and reselling and reselling again) haunted houses to unsuspecting clients, who may know the reason why this particular poem seems to kill. It's not long before Streator, Helen, her assistant Mona (known as Mulberry in the Wiccan circles in which she travels) and Mona's boyfriend Oyster embark on a roadtrip across the country to track down every copy of this culling poem to protect the sleeping infants of the world from inadvertent death.

Like I said it's formulaic, but this just makes it easier to focus on the odd details that Palahniuk likes to toss into the mix. Oyster's long narrations about the history of invasive foreign plants and how this can be used as a means to understand the cannibalistic psyche of modern man, an EMT who learns the culling poem so that he can kill fashion models and then have sex with their dead bodies, the twisted history of antique furniture- they all add together to form a novel that, while not spectacular, definitely envelops you and reminds you why it is that Palahniuk stands out as one of the best contemporary authors of today.