Poison-induced erections and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant

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	• Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey Chuck Palahniuk Doubleday, 2007 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 112 reviews view larger image
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A mind-blowing book. . .

Chuck Palahniuk has taken my mind through a ride that is hard to forget. This book is deep and philosophical on so many levels. The characters are amazing, you'll be hard-pressed to find similiar characters elsewhere. The plot is genius, a plot only Palahniuk could deliver. The idea of "creating the future" is refreshing, an interesting way of looking at the world around you. I have read this book two times now, and I would recommend re-reading this one because it is better the second time around. Rant is a mind-blowing book that should be read by everyone.

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Palahniuk Evolved

With this book, Palahniuk tweaks, and nearly perfects, his own style. I had a love-hate relationship with Haunted. I thought that it would have worked much better as a simple collection of short stories than as a complete narrative. Rant shows Palahniuk's evolution of style from the ooze that was Haunted to this new, fully-formed, completely different organism.

I will admit: the first 150 pages of Rant were a struggle for me. I waded through Casey's rural back-story, almost dropping the book altogether a handful of times, but was eventually brought back around by the time Shot Dunyan started describing boosted peaks. It was fascinating to watch how Palahniuk slowly and methodically pieced together his vision of the future (or the now?) in such a way that it came into focus like one begins to see the picture in a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle.

I see that a lot of the bad reviews here are mainly in reference to the "oral biography" approach to the story. Just because the approach is scattered and non-linear, doesn't mean that the book has no plot. Palahniuk could have just as easily approached this same story in a more traditional format, however, I don't think that it would have had the same impact. For me, the format didn't really pay off until the end, and then it began to make perfect sense why he approached it this way.

Also brilliant is the fact that, as another reviewer pointed out, we are given the entire story in the first four pages. At that point, we just simply don't have enough information to understand what we're being told.

I have always been a fan of Palahniuk's, and while I have, at times, found his plot twists to be manipulative, or anti-climactical (such as in Diary), I have always found them entertaining. That was, for me, the only reason I kept on plowing through Rant. The liner notes promised a "mind-bending" novel, and I kept waiting for my mind to be bent. It was.

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Poison-induced erections and Chuck Palahniuk's Rant

Combining snake bite-induced erections with car crash-induced time travel and a whole host of other bizarre and almost realistic events, Chuck Palahniuk has created another character in his universe of strangeness with Rant Casey.

The story unfolds as a biography of Rant after his death, strung together through snippets of interviews with dozens of his close friends and neighbors. It starts off simply enough: an odd little boy in middle America causes quite a stir as he grows up by getting into mischief like collecting other people's teeth; purposely getting bit by snakes, spiders, and rodents; and using real animal blood and entrails as part of a community haunted house. Palahniuk's simple language and townie slang kept me engaged and enjoying the yarn.

Soon enough, Rant moves to the city, and we find out we're actually in a futuristic world where people "port in" to experience entertainment, reminiscent of the video games from David Cronenberg's eXistenZ or the "feelies" from Brave New World. There's also "Party Crashing," a game people play where they crash their cars into each other. When Palahniuk drops this unusual character of Rant into this even more out of the ordinary world, it's inevitable the story is going to get much more complex and interesting.

What I have always enjoyed about Palahniuk's work is that his characters are incredibly bizarre but he always finds a way to speak through them about very real but seldom-expressed human perspectives. A lot of times it seems he can figure out some of my thoughts and perceptions and explain them to me, with more clarity and sensibility than I would've thought possible. This book is no different: Rant is pretty far from anyone or anything I've ever known, but because of Palahniuk's descriptions, Rant is still somehow familiar.

So, even though the story gets pretty twisted and out of control confusing near the end, it's still a very interesting read with a lot of unpleasant but likable characters.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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