Palahnuik, the author of Fight Club, and Choke has never pulled his punches with his twisted writing style and willingness to explore the most depraved elements of human activity. His fans will surely appreciate his latest novel, Rant, which is a paranoid glance into an future filled with disease and death and is surrounded by Palahnuik‘s signature dark humour. The story is an oral history of Buster Casey’s life as viewed through interviews with his family and friends. Like most protagonists of Palahnuik’s novels, Buster is a character at odds with society and discovers gratification in dark delights, such as purposefully subjecting himself to the stings and bites of venomous insects as a child and later looking to near death experiences for recreation.

The plot can be loosely defined as a look at Buster’s strange childhood in the eerie, continually windy town of Middleton, his later involvement with Party Crashing (a form of tag played with cars) and his eventual spreading of a highly contagious form of rabies that wipes out large amounts of the human population. The book is set in a cyber-fictional near future that Palahnuik uses to magnify the darkest spaces of modern society. In a world where most peoples enjoyment comes from sitting in a room, alone, plugged into a recording of other peoples experiences, Buster and his friends fill the boring hours of every day imitating road traffic accidents.

The multiple narration devices make the story difficult to follow in parts as the reader tries to adapt to the different styles and the contradictions in different peoples viewpoints. However this leads to interesting ways of interpreting the plot and I’d presume this would allow the book to be read several times with new ideas popping up. In terms of style and content Rant is much more daring than Fight Club and many of his other novels. The only place Rant fails is that there is too much going on in the book, too many ideas which are not fully developed- there is time travel, urban myths, countless anecdotes, dysfunctional families, drug abuse, a ton of ideas which could fuel another ten books. However this might be a purposeful attempt of the writer to further the crazy, paranoid tone of the novel designed to involve the reader in the madness. Fans of books like Vernon God Little by DPC Pierre and American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis will find a familiar and enjoyable figure in the character of Buster. Rant is a lunatic car chase, tearing through genres, with ideas flying by almost too fast to comprehend.