Chuck Palahniuk’s New Book!!!!

Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey

• Official website (but don’t bother, it’s fluff): http://www.randomhouse.com/doubleday/palahniuk/rant/
• Amazon.com
• Rant tour dates: http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/author/tour.php
• New York Times Review: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/07/books/07masl.html

Summary from http://www.chuckpalahniuk.net/books/rant/:

Rant takes the form of a (fictional) oral history of Buster “Rant” Casey, in which an assortment of friends, enemies, admirers, detractors, and relations have their say on this evil character, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time.

Buster Casey was every small kid born in a small town, searching for real thrills in a world of video games and action/adventure movies. The high school rebel who always wins (and a childhood murderer?), Rant Casey escapes from his hometown of Middleton for the big city and becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing, where on designated nights, the participants recognize each other by dressing their cars with tin-can tails, “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti, and other refuse, then look for designated markings in order to stalk and crash into each other. It’s in this violent, late-night hunting game that Casey meets three friends. And after his spectacular death, these friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short life. Their collected anecdotes explore the charges that his saliva infected hundreds and caused a silent, urban plague of rabies….

Expect hilarity and 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.

Excerpt from NY Times Review by Janet Maislin:

So “Rant” is a mash-up of earlier, better Palahniuk sucker punches, with elements of his “Fight Club” especially conspicuous this time. This book, like that one, has a violent, ritualistic secret society and a shocking identity switcheroo at its finale. It also has the gallows humor and gleeful adolescent malevolence that can make Mr. Palahniuk so bleakly entertaining. But its ingredients feel arbitrarily slapped together, despite Mr. Palahniuk’s ability to cast his malevolent fantasies in a visionary light. And this book’s structure as oral history is a tactical misstep. It trades Mr. Palahniuk’s scorchingly distinctive voice for a collection of flat and phony ones.