Rant

Ever since Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk has been one of my favourite writers, and his latest novel, Rant, was mental as ever.

Palahniuk has an unstoppable imagination. He takes recognisable themes, then runs off with them, seducing and corrupting them like a Machiavellian cad. He's my favourite kind of speculative fiction writer, as he's actually writing about tomorrow. Not a year from now or ten or a hundred years from now, but as close to now as you can get... except it's a now where everything that's fucked-up about the world has been turned up to eleven. He also has a rabid appetite for research, his novels are always crammed with fascinating information and ideas. Much of this is unbelievable fact, mixed in among the writer's perverse imaginings. Needless to say, you're never entirely sure whether he's spilling astonishing truths or pulling your pudding. And you never know where he's taking you, so a story that starts out down one path can often end up in another world entirely.

Rant is the story of one Buster 'Rant' Casey, a small town kid with a predilection for sticking his hands and legs into animal dens, warrens and burrows in the hope he'll get bitten by the occupant. He's a kid who collects black widows, carries rabies, and sticks rolled-up nose-pickings to his bedroom wall. He's also responsible for secretly murdering most of his own family. When he grows up, he gets involved with the bizarre sport of Party Crashing, staging road accidents for kicks. And then he dies, and becomes a legend. Which is where the novel begins.

Which doesn't really begin to tell you what Rant is really about. As the story races towards it's surprising conclusion (regular Palahniuk readers will know that once the set-up is taken care of, the author delights in rug-pulling revelations that twist like Chubby Checker), it finds a fascinating new approach to an old science fiction staple, re-imagining a classic paradox in a way that only an imagination as warped as Chuck P's could manage. It's bold, it's hilarious, it's surprising, it's mind blowing.

"He's the post-millennial Jonathan Swift," reads the blurb-hype, and it's hard not to agree. As always with Palahniuk novels, you accept the most incredible of ideas because of the way he grounds them in the scariest aspects of today's society... given just one more day's distortion.

"Rant Casey would go down on his belly in the sand, plant his elbows on either side of a burrow, and poke his nose inside. Just from the stink, sniffing some dirty hole, Rant could tell rabbit or coyote or skunk or deadly spider. Could even tell you what kind of spider.

To be Rant Casey's friend was always some test. For guys, you had to shove your had in his choice of dark hole, far up as your elbow, not figuring what you'd find."