“By the time you read this, you’ll be older than you remember.”
About a year ago, there was a column on here where a teenage girl like myself could write about anything that’s not related to music. (I believe I wrote a vegan post, and a couple others…) Regardless, I’m going to start doing that again.
About this time last year, I picked up a book at my local library called Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey. It was written by my favorite author of all time, Chuck Palahniuk, and seemed promising. I read online reviews while standing around in the aisle, because I’ve learned to not trust the inside cover of a book. Everything seemed to regard it as, “told like an oral history” and “macabre but endearing”. I clutched it and headed to the check out.
Rant, Chuck’s eighth novel, already enthralled me before I even reached Chapter 1. Questioning if you ever wished you had never been born, I knew I was in for an interesting read. So interesting, actually, I read it all in one sitting.
The book is in what appears to be either a realistic future or an alternate universe that really isn’t too far off. Our… “protagonist”… is Buster Casey, better known as “Rant”, doesn’t care much for the world. He’s a creepy fella, and you pick up on it right away, when you realize how, erm, sensitive he is to smell. Also, the reason he’s called “Rant”? He would run the haunted house in his town, and would play tricks on those who attended; he would utilize the organs of animals and, long story short, the kids would vomit, which resembled the sound “rant”- that’s how he got his nickname. The boy then discovered a considerable wealth, and in turn, destroyed his small town’s economy. As if that and his disturbing sense of humour wasn’t enough, Rant’s grown to have a penchant for sticking his arm into the dens of animals, just to be bitten. Through this, one of the major plot points is revealed; Rant has a bizarrely mutated case of rabies from this habit, since he became addicted to the feeling of being bitten. This weird health condition was enough for him to threaten his way to getting his diploma early and was payed a large sum of money to leave town.
When he moves into the city, that’s when it clicks that there is a weird form of segregation between two classes. The Daytimers were respectable and the Nighttimers were oppressed. Naturally, Rant has a tendency to be oppressed, and joined the Nighttimers. There’s a secret, underground demolition derby that was called “Party Crashing”. We don’t know how it started, or why, but it’s just very important to the culture. The goal of “Party Crashing” is to crash into the other players and that’s how you “win”. Through this, Rant meets Echo, another Party Crasher, and he falls in love with her. Additionally, Rant goes ahead and starts a nationwide rabies epidemic which ends up being so massive that those infected must be shot and killed on sight.
Rant, unfortunately(?), dies while Party Crashing and it’s highly publicized. When the car in which he died was pried open, his body was gone. This plot twist is where Palahniuk works his magic. Some of the people who were being interviewed claim that if you’re in a certain state of mind before you die, you can be pushed outside of time. Then, once one does this, they can kill their ancestors, which makes them immortal. The most disturbing part of this is that by doing all of that, they can make themselves more than human.
I won’t give away the rest of the ending, but even discussing it is goosebump-worthy. Essentially, this book was a joyride, much like a Party Crashing event. It’s brilliant and mind-blowing, and so funny that you laugh til your gut hurts. However, in retrospect, it’s much more like consuming food. In the beginning, you’re so hungry and you eat so much and it’s delicious, but once you’re finished, you never want to eat that food ever again. The organization of the story and structure of the tale makes it difficult to follow for a bit, until the end, when you get a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach as though you’ve been duped, but it’s so much more than that.
“What if reality is nothing but some disease?”