Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey - Chuck Palahniuk

Chuck Palahniuk's strongest work since 2001's Choke, Rant is constructed as an oral biography of one Buster "Rant" Casey, a quintessential Palahniuk messiah / monster with a penchant for rabid animals, spider-bites and car-crashes. The novel details Rant's upbringing in a small rural town, his increasing addiction to / fascination with the highs resulting from poisonous spider-bites, his nefarious money-making schemes and his eventual flight to the city, wherein he finds himself ensconced in the underground Party Crashing scene. The novel is presented as a series of transcripts culled from interviews with the key players. In the course ...  Read the complete review

"Rant" tells the tale of Rant Casey, born in the redneck town of Middleton to develop an animal bite addiction, become an urban legend and likely a Patient Zero of pan-American rabies epidemic. He leaves Middleton to find his real father in the big, bad city, where he gets involved in a underground game of Party Crashing, where parties dressed in clothes and cars chosen according to the 'flag' of the night meet up to hunt and bump into each other in a game of controlled fender bending. I have not read anything by Palahniuk before, but this is his seventh book and I am told it's not very different from the previous ones. It read as something spawned ...  Read the complete review

There are certain authors that probably have a few screws loose in their heads. If you went out on a summer’s day for a picnic they would be unlikely to pack the required number of sandwiches. In fact, if they were to be made into a confectionary good they would probably be fruit loops. Chuck Palahniuk is one such author. His stories are always dark, adult and menacing, however, they are also always packed with the most unique and insightful ideas. Every book that I read by him makes me both impressed and worried about his state of mind. Sex addicts, models with no lower jaw, imaginary anarchists, killer bed time stories – all these concepts have come out of the ...  Read the complete review