Lullaby (novel) - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Lullaby is the story of Carl Streator, a newspaper reporter who has been assigned to write articles on a series of cases of sudden infant death syndrome, from which his own child had died. Streator discovers that his wife and child had died immediately after he read them a "culling song", or African chant, from a book entitled Poems and Rhymes Around the World. As Streator learns, the culling song has the power to kill anyone it is spoken to. Because of the stress of his life, it became unusually powerful, allowing him to kill by only thinking the poem. During his investigations into other SIDS cases for his article, he finds that a copy of the book was at the scene of each death. In every case, the book was open to a page that contained the "culling song". Streator unintentionally memorizes the deadly poem and he semi-voluntarily becomes a serial killer (killing, for example, annoying radio hosts and people who elbow into an elevator when he is late for work). He then turns to Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who has also found the culling song in the same book and knows of its destructive power. While she is unable to help him stop using the culling song, she is willing to help him stop anyone else from being able to use it again. The two of them decide to go on a road trip across the country to find all remaining copies of the book and remove and destroy the page containing the song. They are joined by Helen's assistant, Mona Sabbat, and Mona's boyfriend, an eco-terrorist named Oyster. Streator now must not only deal with the dangers of the culling song, but with the risk of it falling into the hands of Oyster, who may want to use it for sinister purposes.

In addition to tracking down and destroying any copy of Poems and Rhymes Around the World, the foursome hope to find a "grimoire", a hypothesized spellbook that is the source of the culling spell. Streator wants to destroy it while the others in his group want to learn what other spells it contains—partly in the hope that there is a spell to resurrect the dead. Mona eventually figures out that the datebook Helen had been carrying throughout the trip is the grimoire they had been looking for, written in invisible ink. Helen had acquired it years earlier in the estate of the publisher of Poems and Rhymes Around the World whom she had killed with the culling spell. In the end, the grimoire is used and misused until Helen's body ends up dead with her mind in a police sergeant's body. This connection is made in the final chapters and concludes with the present; Streator and Helen (in the police sergeant's body) are together, searching for Mona and Oyster who have the entirety of the grimoire with the exception of the "culling song".