Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
by Chuck Palahniuk
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Book Summary Information
Author: Chuck PalahniukEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-01
ISBN: 0385517874
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Doubleday
Book Reviews of Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Book Review: Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
Summary: 5 Stars
"Isn't Party Crashing like an electroshock treatment for your depression?" - Neddy Nelson
When I was going to Penn State a good friend suggested reading Chuck Palahniuk's book Fight Club. Since I had already seen the movie I wasn't interested in reading it or anything else for that matter but somehow he got me to sit down and read it. After that book, I wanted to read everything that the man put out. At the time Fight Club, Invisible Monsters, and Choke were all he had and I devoured them. I was forever changed in my belief that books were boring and reading was for nerds because of him.
Over the past few years I've read a lot more books and believed that since my reading level had risen, maybe, Palahniuk's books weren't getting worse, but I was getting better. Even though I was growing as a reader, I always tried to get an advanced readers copy of his books so I could read it as soon as possible, hoping for that spark that Fight Club gave me years before. It took 59 pages to get to the spark, but he did it again.
Buster Landru Casey or "Rant" as his friends call him wanted real blood, real brains, a real anything. He got his nickname of Rant from kids vomiting, also relating to page 59. Rant is the sound that they were making over and over again as they threw up from his "realness." From that day on, it stuck and he no longer went by Buster.
As with most of Chuck's books, he puts in a lot of research that allows the reader to not only enjoy the reading, but learn from it. Everything from rabies to rare coins is discussed throughout the book and you will learn something no matter how hard you try to dismiss fiction as a way to learn real facts. Did you know King Henry the VIII had syphilis?
Even the most gruesome of horrors has a love interest woven into the pages and this book is no different. Echo Lawrence is Rant's love interest and he can tell her what she ate that day, that week, and if she isn't getting enough iron by going down on her. They have the normal boy meets girl, boy goes down on girl, boy repeatedly gives girl rabies kind of relationship.
Rant repeatedly puts his hand down holes in the desert to try and get an animal or insect to bite him. With a bite from a snake, spider, scorpion, jackrabbit, or whatever else is lurking in the hole Rant puts his hand down, he gets a hard-on and cannot get rid of it. This all leads to the boner from a snake bite, leading to burning jock straps in front of his school, and getting equal rights for "boys' burden" with an erection or carrot down their pants the way a period gets a girl out of gym class.
In the future we have ports in the back of our neck that we can turn on and off to record our neural stimuli as well as see the transcripts of someone else's neural stimuli. This means that any event in your life, you can record, completely and totally, with all senses involved for later viewing or to show someone else. Hypothetically, you could record your own death on an airplane including the smell of gas and your last broadcast and send it to your wife's phone.
Rant pretends to be gay to bring his parents expectations down, only to bring them joy for doing something with a girl in a lot of different situations. He wants the life of living to very low expectations because that means that every triumph is a truly great triumph. When his mother sees that he is with Echo a sigh of relief comes out.
The real meat and potatoes of the book is something that Rant gets involved in when he moves away from his tiny town to the big city. Party Crashing is driving around in a car to hit other cars that are a part of the party. There are many rules for this game but if you are in it, you know them and try to follow them as much as possible so that you do not get fouled in the game.
In the future there are Nighttimers and Daytimers, since so many people are in the world some of us live at night while others during the day. The people living at night are the second-class citizens and Rant falls into this crowd. This is the crowd that has party crashes. Also, Nighttimers and Daytimers are separate and have governmental time slots available, if you are a Daytimer and out at night you will be fined and the same goes for Nighttimers out during the day.
I noticed that one of the cars that Rant bought for Echo was a Galaxie 500, and knowing a few of the little tricks that Palahniuk puts in his books I'm guessing this is a tip of the hat to Mr. Clevenger since Eric Ashworth in Dermaphoria also drives a Galaxie 500. Chuck also speaks of road-trip vacations reflecting on his earlier work Invisible Monsters and even fight clubs bringing back his first published novel.
The further into the book we get the more sci-fi the book gets. The ports become more important and the talk of time travel as a possibility comes into play. Did you know if you killed your own father or impregnated your mother you could make a better or invincible you?
In a lot of ways Rant the book, is a modern day bible. Jesus (Rant) didn't sit down and write it, a lot of other people put together the stories that they remember of him. Maybe those stories are completely true, maybe they're not, but they give hope to the reader or at least entertain the reader for a few hours.
In no way is this book perfect but unlike "Haunted," Chuck really hit a nerve and I think his old fans that have "lost that lovin' feelin" will come back with a passion after digging into this book. Then again, maybe I'm making this entire review up and I didn't read the book...
Summary of Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey
?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.
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