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Rant

An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

By Chuck Palahniuk

(114)

| Paperback | 9780385663502

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Book Description

The provocative and mind-bending new novel from the bestselling author of Fight Club and Haunted.

Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors, and relations have theContinue

The provocative and mind-bending new novel from the bestselling author of Fight Club and Haunted.

Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors, and relations have their say on this evil character, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time.

Buster Casey was every small kid born in a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. The high school rebel who always wins – and a childhood murderer? – Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton into the big city and becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where, on designated nights, the participants recognize each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails, “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti, and other refuse, then look for special markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It’s in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey makes three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies . . .

Expect hilarity and 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 man to watch to learn what’s – uh-oh – coming next.

Excerpt from RANT:

Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman): Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities, after they croak their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies they never met in real life.

Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. . . .

The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive–or praising you after you ain’t.


From the Hardcover edition.

Critics

  • 'Rant' by Chuck Palahniuk

    Rant is essentially a story about a now-dead wayward weirdo -- Buster L "Rant" Casey -- who is responsible for an urban plague of rabies and other "pranks" across America. It is set in a technologically advanced dystopian future in which people are s ... (read full critics)

    readingmatters published on Tue, 28 Sep 2010

  • Rabid messiah for a virtual world

    Rant by Chuck Palahniuk 319pp, Jonathan Cape, £12.99 Two pages before it begins, Chuck Palahniuk's eighth novel is already asking you if you wish you'd never been born. You'd better concentrate, because by the time you get to the end, that's an impor ... (read full critics)

    guardian.co.uk published on Sat, 25 Sep 2010

8 Reviews

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  • 1 person find this helpful

    *** This comment contains spoilers! ***

    Just, what the hell?

    At first, an oral biography. Just that.
    It's fascinating to follow the adventures of Rant Casey, his troubled childhood, his pursuit of an escape from his small town.
    I loved the narrative technique. All the point of view mixed together gave out the perfect story rythm to always keep the reader aw ... (continue)

    At first, an oral biography. Just that.
    It's fascinating to follow the adventures of Rant Casey, his troubled childhood, his pursuit of an escape from his small town.
    I loved the narrative technique. All the point of view mixed together gave out the perfect story rythm to always keep the reader awake and aware.
    Rant's life goes on, in the big city. Here, we have the description of the Party Crashing, some sort of destruction derbies in which the protagonist will join Echo, Shot and Neddy, the people who will mostly contribute to the reconstruction of his life.
    It's between a race and the awkward love story between the two protagonists that you start noticing some particulars of this world which make you aware that this is not our earth, not as we know it.
    Chester's profetic visions, boosted peaks, night shifts; and this world turns out to be something you'd never expect. People are divided between nighttimers and daytimers, and their only type of entertainment is to inject an adventure directly in your brain, through a port.
    Rant dies of a pretty useless sacrifice, and when you think you're starting to get used to this, bam, it gets to a whole new level. Time travelling, reaching immortality through interacting with the past, and suddenly everything already read takes a new meaning. Party Crashing is the key, Rant is his father is his grand-father.

    Or maybe, nothing like this.
    Maybe Rant wasn't so... ballsy or big as we remember him. Maybe this is how any religious figure gets created-his friend brag him up, huger and huger, so they can get laid. Maybe people don't travel back in time. Maybe Rant is just dead.
    We are left with this last sentence of Shot Dunyun -the rational one, maybe the only sane, maybe the only insane- to reason on.
    What story is this? What's it hidden behind?
    Personally, I have no idea, but I utterly enjoyed this book. Chuck Palahniuk proves again to be my favorite author, with his multiple successful sperimentations, his infallible writing style and his stories, insanely awesome.

    Is this helpful?

    Codinh said on Mar 25, 2010 about the Hardcover edition | 1 feedback

  • 1 person find this helpful

    Rabies, incest, time travel, car crashes and flaming christmas trees - what more could you want?

    Is this helpful?

    Jon Randy said on Aug 24, 2009 | Add your feedback

  • At first, this novel looked pretty straight-forward. The subtitle of the book lays it all up. Buster Casey's life is opened wide by people who knew him and even by some who knew of him. So, what's special? I can't really write much without giving the plot up, which would lend itself to quite some in ... (continue)

    At first, this novel looked pretty straight-forward. The subtitle of the book lays it all up. Buster Casey's life is opened wide by people who knew him and even by some who knew of him. So, what's special? I can't really write much without giving the plot up, which would lend itself to quite some internal stirring.

    It's obvious that this book is written by the same person who wrote "Fight Club". Palahniuk's style, never avoiding, super-sizing or contrasting what's taboo in modern western society makes for very interesting reading where sex, death and The Nuclear Family are involved.

    There are some quite substantial layers here. After 3/4 of the book everything was turned on its head. I thought I had this whole thing thought-out, but no! And then some.

    At times, the dialogue feels as contrived and ham-fisted as if it were lifted from detective pulp fiction. At its best, it sails over the past, in more than one sense of the word, freeing the reader, making the plausible possible.

    All in all, it's a very complex, finely written tale which is exciting, funny beyond time and rabid like some of its inhabitants.

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    Niklas Pivic said on Jan 25, 2011 | Add your feedback

  • okay, wrong time... probably

    i think the way the book is constructed - whilst original - is just not for me right now. It seems made up of snippets of different recollections of the main character, from a number of different characters. Sometimes these recalls are just a paragraph long... right now I need a more constant, unbro ... (continue)

    i think the way the book is constructed - whilst original - is just not for me right now. It seems made up of snippets of different recollections of the main character, from a number of different characters. Sometimes these recalls are just a paragraph long... right now I need a more constant, unbroken thread.
    To be able to enjoy this book, I need a sunny holiday, lounging around doing very little for hours on end, a sunshade, a glass of iced water, later - a back massage. For me, this is that kind of book, it just doesn't reward limited time periods of reading I have available to me...
    I'll come back to it... probably

    Is this helpful?

    mrpeterryan said on Mar 3, 2010 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

  • My first Palahniuk's book. probably my last. Not exactly my cup of tea. I got through the book at last but it took much longer than I expected. Lots of loose ends and a somewhat too tangled plot. Too many threads and far too many narrative voices. You miss most of them and you have to try and remem ... (continue)

    My first Palahniuk's book. probably my last. Not exactly my cup of tea. I got through the book at last but it took much longer than I expected. Lots of loose ends and a somewhat too tangled plot. Too many threads and far too many narrative voices. You miss most of them and you have to try and remember who's who all the time for lack of distinction. The idea of an oral collective biography is not brand new either, think for instance about Truman Capote's In cold blood. And then time travelling, and rabies, and growing up in the middle of nowhere, and urban decay, and what not.
    Covering just a couple of those themes would probably have yielded better results.
    Only positive element: the quality of writing which is quite high here and there. Pity it doesn't hold all the way through.

    Is this helpful?

    Maria Teresa Ciaffaroni said on Feb 1, 2010 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

  • New Favorite Author!

    I wasn't aware of Palahniuk really until I saw this book on a neighbor's shelf. I grabbed it from the Library learning there that he is also responsible for Fightclub and Choke. Why this hasn't been made in to a major motion picture, I have no idea. Regardless, I'll be grabbing everything else he ha ... (continue)

    I wasn't aware of Palahniuk really until I saw this book on a neighbor's shelf. I grabbed it from the Library learning there that he is also responsible for Fightclub and Choke. Why this hasn't been made in to a major motion picture, I have no idea. Regardless, I'll be grabbing everything else he has written and consuming it all as fast as I can. Great read, and interesting format.

    Is this helpful?

    Dkissell said on Jan 15, 2010 about the Hardcover edition | Add your feedback

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