As many other readers, I too have been introduced to the worlds created by Chuck Palahniuk thanks to David Fincher's cinematic adaptation of Fight Club. After the movie, I grabbed myself Invisible Monsters, Chuck's third novel following Fight Club and Survivor, and was blown away. Rant is my latest descent into his work, having finished it just about fifteen minutes ago. Rant tells the story of Buster Casey in the form of an Oral Biography told by many voices; childhood friends, neighbors, members of his family, enemies, people who've interacted with him by chance, people who just heard about him, doctors, priests etc. This is what makes this read very enjoyable. Each chapter is broken up into paragraphs spoken by a wide variety of characters; each paragraph with a voice of its own.
Buster 'Rant' Casey (nicknamed after the sound children make when they are vomiting) grows up in Middleton, born to a very young mother as the possible product of a rape in the hands of a child molester. As he grows up, he develops an addiction for bites and stings of animals and insects. In High School, and suffering from consistent long-term erections caused by black widow poison, he becomes infected with rabies and eventually causes an epidemic.
"What 'Typhoid Mary' Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas wasto AIDS, and Liu Jianlun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for Rabies."
After moving to the city, we learn that Rant is living in a near future, or an alternative present, where people are divided into 'Daytimers,' and 'Nighttimers.' Soon he joins a group of nighttimers that practice what is known as Party Crashing, an activity played out as a sport, where people drive through the night, crashing their cars against other Party Crashers. Here we meet Shot Dunyun, Echo Lawrence, and Green Tyler Simms, three of the most recurrent characters that would later become key elements in the story.
The novel is condensed with enough plots that could've been used in the making of three different novels, but are tied in almost perfectly at the end. This, however, requires full reader attention, or you'll be seeking through pages earlier on in the novel as the concluding twist approaches. This will not appeal to everyone.
Even after the book begins, Palahniuk gives us a sample of what it's all about by writing: "Do you ever wish you'd never been born?" in a single page. It all starts off simple, straight-forward enough, but we as we dive into the plot we are hit with hints and details that strike the 'what the fuck' chord in our mind.
"We'll never be as young as we are tonight."
There are a lot of similarities here to other novels. The whole Party Crashing scene feels a lot like the Fight Clubs in his first novel; self-destruction as a form of therapy. Rant Casey feels a lot like a re-take on Tyler Durden. The Crashing experience reminds me a bit of J.G. Ballard's novel Crash. I don't mind any of this. I've learned appreciate similarities as kind-of homages.
The thing that did bother me was the unneeded overflow of information provided during the 'Werewolves' chapters (there's five chapters entitled 'Welwolves I, II, III...'). Often, this information kept repeating itself, making it quite distressful. However, I knew I couldn't skip them for fear of missing something important to the plot.
"The future you have tomorrow won't be the same future you had yesterday."
But right after the scene of Rant's death (don't worry about it being a spoiler, you know he dies since the beginning), I couldn't put the book down. The scene is fast-paced, well achieved, and everything after that is quite ambitious, almost touching the line between clever and pretentious, but always remaining safe around its borders. The author manages extremely well adding yet another plot device into the story, concerning time-travel and a huge satire on religion. This is the point where people who are devoted to their religious believes will most probably be offended (if they haven't been already.)
Overall, the book is an often hilarious ride of twists and turns that might have some readers rather dazzled and confused by the end. It offers some interesting views on many subjects that sometimes might seem like it's being forced in, but that didn't take away from the experience of a cleverly-plotted mind-fuck of a novel.
Rating: 8.5/10
