Book Review

Rating: (4.5 out of 5)
Paperback: 352 pages
Publisher: Amazon Remainders Account (April 20, 2004)
ISBN-10: 0316168815
ASIN: B000FDFVZ6

Buster (Rant) Casey, Echo Lawrence, Tina Something, Green Taylor Simms and others… What are they all doing in this “oral history” book? Party Crashing? Historians? Time? Space? And the importance of poison. What’s the connection?

Well, it’s funny, so all the reviews profess. Yes, it’s funny-ish, hilarious in parts, but that’s not what makes this an unbelievable book. It’s Palahniuk’s first SCIENCE FICTION novel. We all know that most of what takes place in Palahniuk’s books is akin to magical fiction at worst or spiritual tattle tailing at best. It’s another look through the dimensional warp furnished by allegory and make-believe. Same here but more fixated with a social order and more politically blatant than any other of the man’s works. As far as its professed science fictional element goes, it takes place in an arbitrary future that might have resulted when some doofus politician made a few radical changes to the way the entire modern world works last week. It’s that future that the inhabitants of “Rant” occupy; that reckless, that horrific.

Book cover of “Rant” by Chuck Palahniuk. (© Anchor) And photo of the author. (© Getty Images)

It’s not a traditional reading book where you systematically work through three acts to some convoluted arbitrary conclusion like thrillers or murder mysteries. In this book each and every personal revelation re-convolutes and re-configures its own identity. Onion skins, that’d be the way to describe this narrative form. Instead of story being unravelled, people are unravelled; literally frame by frame each characteristic of you is analysed by someone who’s not you. You see yourself through the many translations of yourself via this complex group matrix.

and then you find out how the world’s wired…
and then you find out that all the people in rant’s car are….
and then you find out the rant’s girlfriend is…
and it just continues on and on…

Page after page is littered with three or four short “testimonies” from the fifty or so characters in the book. My personal favourite is Echo Lawrence, who goes on about the taste of certain venereal diseases: syphilis tastes like curried chicken, hepatitis tastes like veal with capers, HIV like buttered popcorn, most forms of cancer taste like tartar sauce.

Then, on page 114, a chapter called “Boosted Peaks” is devoted entirely to a radical new global entertainment medium, it’s a really wild ride that’s just sat there in the middle of the book like some crazy side street hobo action you might drive by and thank the lord you weren’t fished in. It goes on for seven pages about the psycho-technical aspects of… well, you’ll have to read it to see. But it’s also about 9/11 and the War on Terror—it’s a fairly simple juxtaposition to see how the Emergency Health Powers Act is actually the Patriot Act and rabies is blatant iconography for the terrorist threat. And more than being a book about the sordid exploits of a ruthless serial killer, it’s a book about deceit; a strangely Cold War novel of omission and revelation.