Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

[May 2nd, 2007] Sometimes, when I'm driving real fast on a steep road, I start veering toward the guardrail. Playing chicken with myself. But Chuck Palahniuk has got me thinkin' that I've got it all wrong.

I should be aiming at the other cars.

In the author's latest gut-twister of a novel, Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey (Doubleday, 320 pages, $24.95), Palahniuk, longtime Portlander and the brain behind Fight Club, introduces us to Party Crashing, the latest way disaffected Americans in the near future connect—by stalking and then slamming the shit outta each other's vehicles. He also introduces us to Party Crashing's Messiah, Buster (Rant) Casey, who has kick-started a national rabies epidemic (turning Americans into the likes of the drooling, shambling extras from 28 Days Later) by getting high from animal bites and stealing kisses from lonely country girls—and their mothers.

True to its "oral bio" tag, Rant's odd entrance and odder exit from this world are revealed through scattershot interviews with Rant's mysterious father, his gimp dominatrix girlfriend, his Crash posse and a bemused "historian" named Green Taylor Simms, among others. It's a winsome, sprawling horror of a book, worth following along with if only to find out how the disparate threads of infectious disease, ritualistic auto carnage and probable matricide will knit together. And, oh yes, they do.

In Portland conversations, Palahniuk's name gets mentioned with a smirk, denoting that, really, what has the pulpy author ever done besides give director David Fincher the raw material for the most entertaining man-cinema ever?

But to dismiss Palahniuk as film fodder is to also name his biggest charm: His books are movies. His high-octane, blood-spattered prose transmits sharper visions than a big-budget horror flick. His heroes, ranging from terrorizing cross-dressers (Invisible Monsters) and schizoid Fight Clubbers, to—who can forget—boys who lose their lower intestines to pool pumps mid-orgasm (Haunted), are juicy roles begging to be cast (if an NC-17 rating didn't stop them first). Rant's choppy oral-history style serves to highlight the author's strengths: Jumping readers straight into the action, leaving character development to be gleaned from inference or anecdote.

The book also highlights Palahniuk's weaknesses. The themes are no surprise (gore; the evils of a disconnected, consumer-driven society). And, sure enough, somewhere between the revelation that all Americans are now outfitted with Matrix-style multimedia ports and the theory that Mr. Casey just may be his own grandfather, the narrative begins to devolve into a muddle of government conspiracy theories. Luckily, before it goes over the cliff, Rant's whiplash ride is wild enough to make you want to grab your own car keys and go party.