Rant: A modern spin on Satire

Rant by Chuck Palahniuk takes a new spin on a classic storytelling novel. Buster Casey, the main character of the novel, is a rebel. One of his favorite things to do when he was little (and alive) was to spread rabies to as many people as he could. In his town, if you had rabies, everyone knew you hooked up with Buster Casey. In Buster Casey’s older years he was in a group of people who would go around and have “themed car accidents”. For example, on “Wedding Crashers Day” they would all dress up for a wedding, and then continue to get themselves involved in car accidents.
After Buster Casey’s death, some of his friends go back to his old town to find out more about him, and say their final goodbyes. Throughout the whole novel, we hear stories from people around town who knew Buster when he was little. First hand encounters, you could say. We hear from police, old teachers, historians, and even his childhood best friend. You could say Buster, also known as Rant, was a very popular person, who can always find something knew to scam his town. One of my favorite stories, was when he and his best friend would go around and collect old paint cans. Eventually they started to find people’s life savings in them. They got the idea to become the town’s very own “Tooth Fairy” and would go around exchanging teeth for money, and keep some money for themselves. Eventually they became rich, and the town’s economy was thriving.
The novel is a small size, but not the easiest to follow. The plot is always moving from time period to time period, and narrators constantly change. The plot will end in one spot, and continue further down the line. You can tell that this wasn’t Palahniuk’s first novel. The way he set up his style: innapropriate but funny, shows that this isn’t his first rodeo. The feeling you got when reading his book is something completely weird, yet satisfying. The way the town is depicted makes your body crawl and feel dirty everywhere, but also makes you want to live there to experience everything that’s going on. I say the novel is very well written, but I would not recommend it to anyone with a small tolerance for sex jokes, period stories, and overall inappropriate contents. If you fully grasp what Palahniuk is getting at, this can be a great read.