Product Description

“Like most people I didn’t meet Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of friends just explodes.…”


Rant is the mind-bending new novel from Chuck Palahniuk, the literary provocateur responsible for such books as the generation-defining classic Fight Club and the pedal-to-the-metal horrorfest Haunted. It takes the form of an oral history of one Buster “Rant” Casey, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time.


“What ‘Typhoid Mary’ Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas was to AIDS, and Liu Jian-lun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for rabies.”


A high school rebel who always wins (and a childhood murderer?), Rant Casey escapes from his small hometown of Middleton for the big city. He becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. On appointed nights participants recognize one another by such designated car markings as “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti and then stalk and crash into each other. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. Their collected anecdotes explore the possibility that his saliva caused a silent urban plague of rabies and that he found a way to escape the prison house of linear time.…


“The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.”
—Rant Casey


Expect hilarity, 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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #25649 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-01
• Released on: 2007-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Buster Casey, destined to live fast, die young and murder as many people as he can, is the rotten seed at the core of Palahniuk's comically nasty eighth novel (after Haunted; Lullaby; Diary; etc.). Set in a future where urbanites are segregated by strict curfews into Daytimers and Nighttimers, the narrative unfolds as an oral history comprising contradictory accounts from people who knew Buster. These include childhood friends horrified by the boy's macabre behavior (getting snakes, scorpions and spiders to bite him and induce instant erections; repeatedly infecting himself with rabies), policemen and doctors who had dealings with the rabies "superspreader"; and Party Crashers, thrill-seeking Nighttimers who turn city streets into demolition derby arenas. After liberally infecting his hometown peers with rabies, Buster hits the big city and takes up with the Party Crashers. A series of deaths lead to a police investigation of Buster (long-since known as "Rant"—the sound children make while vomiting) that peaks just as Buster apparently commits suicide in a blaze of car-crash glory. This dark religious parable (there's even a resurrection) from the master of grotesque excess may not attract new readers, but it will delight old ones. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Zombies, government conspiracies, religious epiphanies, time travel, a postmodern Typhoid Mary, and a woman who mixes thumbtacks into her cookie dough—all are fair game in Rant, Chuck Palahniuk's eighth novel. Critics agreed that Rant is vintage Palahniuk, a grim thriller ride filled with his signature black humor, withering social commentary, and stomach-churning details. Some grumbled, however, that the ideas in Rant have been recycled from previous novels, particularly Fight Club. They were also disappointed with the novel's lack of depth, distracting structure (a succession of hundreds of brief eyewitness testimonies), and underlying glorification of violence. The truth is that Palahniuk is an acquired taste. Readers either love him or leave him alone, and will judge Rant accordingly.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
In his eighth novel, Palahniuk uses a new form--oral history--to revisit the themes that have always informed his oeuvre. Buster "Rant" Casey, a naturopathic serial killer, is dead, and those who survive him--family, friends, enemies, and hangers-on--are trying to make sense of the void left by his passing. Perhaps offering a meditation on celebrity, the author explores the topics that have always intrigued him: uniqueness and belonging, cross-generational panic, the search for authenticity, and the consume-or-die worldview. If this suggests that Palahniuk's biggest influence here is himself, this Tom Sawyer on methamphetamine (the first 100 pages depict Casey's boyhood as a poison-obsessed, priapic Pied Piper) belies the influence of William S. Burroughs (in its satire of boys'-own adventures), William Gibson (characters "boost" each others' neural transcripts of lived experience), and J. G. Ballard (Casey's clique crashes cars in order to feel more alive). Outrageous but not quite over the top, full of energetic humor, Rant (Casey's nickname is said to be onomatopoeic for the sound of children vomiting) is a memorable portrait of the cults that gather around authentically different people and a portrait of dystopia that feels unsettlingly contemporary. Palahniuk is no Studs Terkel, but Terkel's heartland probably looks more like Palahniuk's nowadays. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Like I told you, I didn't really meet Rant Casey until after he was dead
"Perpetuating Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny breaks ground for further socilization"... When reading this book I didn't care much for the first two hundred pages; but the final hundred brought the picture all into focus, and put a nice frame around it! Recommended Reading

Chuck is a master!
Rant is imaginative and completely original. You may feel lost trying to figure out what exactly is going on during the first few pages but soon everything falls into place and your mind is totally blown! The best book I have read in years and sure to be a modern classic. I love all the books I have read by Chuck Palahniuk and Rant is my favorite. You need this book.

Less than 1 star
I really enjoyed fight club.

Rant was lame. I felt like there is a "MacGuyver" formula here.

Go to the library, got a book on old coins, the latest automobile magazine and the special popular mechanics issue of time travel. Think of 4 supporting character and 1 central character and write a story. Macguyver's would have been better and so would mine.

The other books I have read by Palahniuk were just mediocre- almost like they were made to be a video release-only movie. I can see why my high school students love this guy. He leaves them feeling empowered, like they read something with substance free of cliches and filled with imaginative sex and violence. In essence, the books are overly formulaic and quite boring.

If you think this is literature, you are wasting your time.

They dont compare to GW Ballard's "Crash" or Joseph Suglia's "Watch Out", (although I would not recommend either to a high school student!).