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  • Thanks for the recommendation, Guy. This was a fun read with a good sci-fi angle and yet enough fresh content to make it interesting. Not at all what I expected when I picked it up.

    

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• ― Kevin Kuphal said on Feb 11, 2008 | Add your feedback

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  • Reading Rant

  • Honestly, I just don't even know what to say about Chuck Palahniuk's Rant. Generally, I would not describe myself as a Palahniuk fan. And as far as Rant is concerned, I received an advance copy so it wasn't precisely a book I would go out and choose to read. I haven't particularly enjoyed past Palah ... Continue

    Honestly, I just don't even know what to say about Chuck Palahniuk's Rant. Generally, I would not describe myself as a Palahniuk fan. And as far as Rant is concerned, I received an advance copy so it wasn't precisely a book I would go out and choose to read. I haven't particularly enjoyed past Palahniuk books.

    Rant is compulsively readable, if a little too mind-bending. It is written as an oral biography, in the tradition of books like George Plimpton's biography of Truman Capote or Legs McNeil's The Other Hollywood. What this means is that the author appears to have interviewed a number of people and then set down their words in print verbatim. Obviously, Rant is fictional, so all of these interviews are made up, but it is an interesting technique and is good for bringing a plethora of unreliable narrators into the fray.

    Rant is the story of an infamous character named Rant Casey, AKA Buster Casey, AKA Buddy Casey. We hear the events of this man's life through many personalities - his mother, childhood friends, and a cadre of "party crashers", people who engage in a game that has them driving around in ridiculously decorated cars as they try to crash into one another without completely destroying their vehicles. Rant is believed to be a mass murderer - he has rabies and has spread it to a degree that the illness has become a pandemic. And yet, this isn't the weirdest thing about him. To reveal much more would sort of destroy the story, though I think Palahniuk lays out all clues in very plain sight. It's a strange book, and yet it's nearly impossible to put down.

    

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• ― moogle said on Apr 20, 2007 about the Hardcover edition| Add your feedback

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 for 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 designated markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It's in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey meets 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 visionary to watch to learn what's —uh-oh—coming next.

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