‘Do you ever wish you’d never been born?’ red-lines the blurb of ‘Rant’, threatening yet more millennial clever-dickery; but as ever, Palahniuk takes so redundant a notion, strips it down and uses it to stir around the latest batch of seemingly haphazard ideas coagulating in his brainpan. Meet Rant Casey – inbred cracker fabulist or Christ redressed as a rabid redneck with killer looks and a yen for big-city lights? By the end we’re still not sure.
Perhaps we were more certain at the beginning. Either way, it’s thanks to Rant that we will soon know more about subjects we previously had no idea existed, and a good deal less about the nature of the world around us.
Thanks to a childhood knack for finding hidden treasure around the flyblown desert town of Middleton, USA, Rant bankrolls a move to Palahniuk City and sets about seeding the rabies virus to which he has spent his childhood building an immunity across a bifurcated day-/night-dwelling population jacked on virtual reality and Party Crashing.
Party Crashing consists of an underground network of auto-erotic outcasts bedecked in wedding get-up or driving ‘soccer mom’ SUVs or with their rides festooned with Christmas decorations prowling the street in pursuit of fetishistic snarl-ups with like-minded others. While all this initially appears, like Palahniuk’s fight clubs, to be the last word in nihilistic ennui, how it relates to Rant’s fomenting plague, Shot Dunyun’s VR terrorism or Green Taylor Simms’ oblique, anthropological field-studies is imparted with a logical rigour that perfectly counterbalances the author’s unchecked imaginative maelstrom and turns the whole book inside out.
Just as ‘Fight Club’ pondered the price of everyone becoming supermen, ‘Rant’ goes one further and wonders the price of us all becoming gods. It is a common thread in Palahniuk’s writing: the yearning for a ground zero of social parity versus our genetically programmed rebellion against hegemony. An altogether more complex novel than that earlier faux-Nietzschean call to arms, this ‘Rant’ is anything but.
