Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

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Product Description

“Like most people I didn’t meet Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of friends just explodes.…”

Rant is the mind-bending new novel from Chuck Palahniuk, the literary provocateur responsible for such books as the generation-defining classic Fight Club and the pedal-to-the-metal horrorfest Haunted. It takes the form of an oral history of one Buster “Rant” Casey, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time.

“What ‘Typhoid Mary’ Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas was to AIDS, and Liu Jian-lun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for rabies.”

A high school rebel who always wins (and a childhood murderer?), Rant Casey escapes from his small hometown of Middleton for the big city. He becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. On appointed nights participants recognize one another by such designated car markings as “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti and then stalk and crash into each other. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. Their collected anecdotes explore the possibility that his saliva caused a silent urban plague of rabies and that he found a way to escape the prison house of linear time.…

“The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.”
—Rant Casey

Expect hilarity, horror, and blazing insight into the desperate and surreal contemporary human condition as only Chuck Palahniuk can deliver it. He's the postmillennial Jonathan Swift, the visionary to watch to learn what's —uh-oh—coming next.

Customer Reviews: Read 117 more reviews...

5 out of 5 stars

Ravin' About Rant May 4, 2007
78 out of 87 found this review helpful

I've heard it said that there are no new ideas left in the world. The proliferation of movie remakes, regurgitated pop music, and Danielle Steele novels certainly add to this argument. Even in "Rant," Palahniuk's latest novel, you won't see anything that hasn't already been covered by Sartre, Camus, or The Terminator. The thing about Palahniuk (and other brilliant writers like David Mitchell, Craig Clevenger, and Jonathan Lethem) is that while the message may not be all that new, the manner in which it is told is nothing short of stunning.

If you're paying close enough attention, Palahniuk gives away almost the entire story in the first four pages, and he drops plenty of hints along the way for those who still haven't caught on. "Rant" is about, alternately, an underground cult of car crashers, a rabies epidemic, the true essence of religion, and a guy named Buster Casey who is addicted to spider bites. Like his other novels, Palahniuk employs an encyclopedic knowledge of the macabre. His spare, punching prose ties together a medley of ideas and facts until what you're left with is a dizzying collage that is so kaleidoscopic, it'll probably take you three reads just to get half of what he's saying.

And he says a lot, in spite of the low page count. Some of "Rant," in fact, might feel rewarmed to the hardcore Palahniuk fan. A character named Echo Lawrence makes her money by exploiting the same weaknesses manipulated by Choke's Victor Mancini. Buster's physical immolations recall Shannon McFarland's reality-enhancing disfigurement from Invisible Monsters. And the whole idea of Party Crashing (an underground cult of Nighttimers who get their kicks by intentionally hunting down and wrecking into each other) is an obvious off-shoot of Fight Club's nihilistic pugilism (an observation that is actually made by Palahniuk himself, three-quarters through the book).

While those past books were great in their own ways (although "Choke" was a bit more mainstream than usual), they were also all pretty single-minded of purpose. In "Rant," Palahniuk's blistering pen stabs into several themes -- population control, theistic iconography, segregation, and (of course) life as a diversion from reality, the theft of existence by a society that is happier with blunted and denuded entertainments than with the raw, sometimes poisonous, bite of true, fully aware experience. Most Eastern philosophies are all about achieving true consciousness through an elevation of the mind; Palahniuk wants the same thing, but his methods of transcendence involve far more noise, chaos, and pain.

If it sounds confusing, it is, but the real brilliance (and -- believe it or not -- beauty) of "Rant" is how all of these themes dissolve into one another. There is no clutter here, in spite of the density of the words. The fact that the book is arranged in the form of an oral biography -- told exclusively through snippets of interviews and recorded information -- only adds to the story's web-like framework, highlights each dark, glistening strand.

"Rant" is a lot of things. It is part Strange Days, part Perfume, and part Cronenberg's Crash. It is half a condemnation of a spirit-deadening world, and half a celebration of it. It's morbid, grotesque, unsettling, evocative, and sometimes just plain hilarious.

It's Palahniuk. What more can I say?

1 out of 5 stars

For superfans only -- all others can skip it May 19, 2007
16 out of 22 found this review helpful

I liked Fight Club a lot. Choke was pretty good. The one with the woman on the island I couldn't finish because it was too dull.

Now comes Rant. My 4th and definitely my last Palahniuk purchase. Rant is just not very good. It reads like a second-rate writer attempting to mimic Palahniuk's style. I kid you not: the cover is the best thing about it.

I know that every writer, musician, director etc. who produces a huge hit early in their career has to labor under the curse of high expectations from then on. So I think the appropriate critical question to ask is not "is Rant as good as Fight Club?" --- that would demand too much. Rather, we should ask "is Rant good enough to hold its own and not make me wish I were re-reading Fight Club?"

But even by that relaxed standard, Rant still comes up short. The problem for Palahniuk is that his books just aren't that different. He makes life difficult for himself by going back to the same well over and over. Rant's narrative gimmicks fall into two categories: those that Palahniuk has done better before (Party Crashers < Fight Clubs) and those where Palahniuk seems to be trying to outdo himself, but just comes across as random, preposterous and desperate (time travel?!?)

Let's take the whole god-messiah-Jesus narrative strand. This stuff was cliched when William Faulkner did it 75 yrs ago. Whenever a writer starts scheduling events on Christmas, heavy-handed crap is sure to follow (and it certainly does here.)

Worst of all, even if you indulge Palahniuk and read through to the end, there's no payoff --- all the pieces just don't add up to much. Fight Club had preposterous moments, but it was easy to forgive them, because everything was attached to an allegorical backbone that had its own internal logic and came to a satisfying resolution.

Whereas with Rant, Palahniuk seems to have wedged in every idea that popped into his head. There isn't much glue between them, and even though the book is relatively short, you will get lost as Palahniuk switches from epidemiology to gross-out humor to Party Crashers to immaculate conceptions.

One view of Palahniuk is that he's a good writer who, for whatever reason, keeps cranking out mediocre books. Another view is that he's a mediocre writer who just got lucky with Fight Club. Rant is bad enough that it pushes me toward the second theory. Palahniuk has a great eye and a great voice, but that ain't enough to make a novel worth reading.

2 out of 5 stars

Chuck Amok May 10, 2007
14 out of 30 found this review helpful

The author tries to cram this novel with all the clever prose he is famous for, but it's overkill to the extreme. Rabies, kinky sex, animal bites, car crashes, and on and on. The result is a work of fiction that drives the reader to exhaustion from exposure to all its frantic activity. Palahniuk uses the approach of having multiple (dozens!) narrators to put the story of Buster Casey together, and after a while, you lose track of who is who, and you don't really care anymore. Finally, the futuristic elements that are thrown in are just the last straw.

I admire this guy tremendously and keep hoping he gets back on track after several failed attempts, but he continues to disappoint, while I continue to hope.

3 out of 5 stars

3 1/2 Stars...Minions and Brainwashing May 18, 2007
13 out of 30 found this review helpful

Good ol Chuck serves up one of his most imaginative, entertaining, and convoluted stories yet. If you think his creative well has run dry, think again.

While previous efforts have showcased urban settings, with modern, cynical characters, "Rant" features a redneck setting for its first hundred pages. The feel is different from his other books, and I was captivated. I wondered where this would go. Then, it jumped suddenly back into regular Chuck-itory, with death and maiming through auto collisions as a replacement for the violence at the end of others' fists in "Fight Club." Although the Party Crasher idea lacks bite, since it is controlled by more level-headed rules, Chuck holds onto a few surprises at the end.

The Party Crashers, and Rant Casey himself, are not merely kids out for a few thrills on a week night. They are people searching for more, for the depths of relationship, family, death--and the antithesis of all the above. In conclusion, the story becomes a genre-bending, culture-defying, and sacriligious tale.

I've always appreciated Mr. Palahniuk's ability to explore ideas, to create themes from chaos, and to challenge the status quo. Here, I was hooked for most of the story, only to be disillusioned by the final hyperboles. Religious groups, for example, have often failed to acknowledge spiritual truths that are paralleled in society; Chuck, however, decides to lambast those truths by tearing down and reconstructing their foundations.

As always, I love the out-of-the-box thinking. I just don't like watching Chuck force [...] down our throats until we become minions to his theories--the very sort of societal brainwashing that he wants us to reject.

4 out of 5 stars

Thought-provoking postmodern experiment in storytelling May 31, 2007
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

Chuck is back! I can happily and unreservedly recommend "Rant" -- to fans of Palahniuk, that is.

After "Haunted", which had many interesting moments, but which otherwise failed to really come together for me, "Rant" is a satisfying, interesting, challenging read. The narrative structure is definitely different, taking the form of transcripts from oral interviews about a character who's no longer on the stage to represent himself. As a result, what you get is a tangled projection, at times incomplete and often contradictory, of that central character, as seen through the eyes of the people who knew him. And by the way, this narrative technique subtly echoes the neural transcripts described *within* the story.

As the story progresses (NO SPOILERS), it gradually undertakes a systematic deconstruction and reconstruction of the character of Buster Casey, which continues to evolve in unexpected ways throughout. The nice thing about this process is that it makes you keep returning (in your mind) to previous points in the narrative, realizing they didn't mean quite what you thought at the time.

There's also the unique metaphor of "boosting peaks", and once you've read the book, you'll see how that metaphor applies to the perceptual process of reading Rant's story through the senses of people *other* than Rant himself. There's also the metaphor of the car salesman -- in which Wallace Boyer is essentially a representative of the author, Chuck Palahniuk, himself. Like Boyer, Palahniuk carefully, and skillfully, directs readers through a series of "control questions", "embedded commands", and "pacing", taking them exactly and only where he wants them to go.

The novel explores some big, mind-bending ideas, too, all with a vintage Palahniuk backdrop. Surreal touches like the "Sex Tornado", "Animal Fishing", and "Party Crashing" will remind you of other Palahniuk novels, while the voices of the characters in "Rant" are rather different. They remind me of the characters in Mark Richard's "The Ice at the Bottom of the World", which I've also reviewed (and this is meant as a very favorable comparison). Other aspects remind me of the postmodern elements of a Don DeLillo. Also, because of the narrative structure, the novel is *all dialogue*, and no description (except for what you get in dialogue). It's a little bit more like a play than a novel in that way. Very interesting, and usually successful.

An added bonus: Palahniuk manages to put a reference to his own "Fight Club" into the novel, evoking it as a cultural artifact in the world Rant Casey inhabits.

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