Palahniuk back in biblical proportions

By Hannah Hayes

Published May 4, 2007

Chuck Palahniuk has become more biblical in proportions to his readers than the overtones he lays across his plotlines.

With his most recent novel, "Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey," Palahniuk doesn't relent on his old themes of masculinity and cults. Rather, he twists them into a new form of writing that feels like watching a rock-star documentary but reads like Aldous Huxley.

Casey starts out as a boy born to a paranormally boring existence and grows into a rebel without a cause. He develops strange skills, specializing in identification and penchants for animal bites. Palahniuk describes winds that whip up tornadoes of bloody tampons, maxi-pads and used condoms out of toppled trashcans that catch in the fences; Casey can tell who used which item in his small town just by the smell or color.

If you're looking for the anatomically graphic, overly sensual, descriptive prose Palahniuk provides in his previous novels, especially the "Choke" variety, they saturate "Rant"'s warped tale as disease enters the picture. From when Casey infects the population of teenage girls with rabies to when he figures out that "killer" boners can get him out of class, no author could give it to you better.

But the novel switches gears as Casey leaves his humdrum town for the big city and starts using machines rather than nature to give him his outwardly appearing cheap thrills. Joining up with a group of adolescents who call themselves the Party Crashers, he enters something bigger than himself, reminiscent of Fight Club's Project Mayhem, just a little more concentrated. Then Casey, the scientifically deemed "super spreader" of rabies and publicly reckoned serial killer, leaves the earth, which he has changed through no perceived effort.

Although Palahniuk is just as attached to his style as his readers are, he figures out a way to bring them everything, from Casey's mother's meek, disillusioned personality to his friends' colloquial and unrefined perception of a man who had an unknown destiny disguised as self-fulfillment, however tainted it was. Jesus anyone?

And, in a way, this book is as much of a bible as the Bible is - from a novelistic standpoint. While the Gospels are an account of Jesus, a man with a cause bigger than where he was placed, "Rant" is a new gospel. As Palahniuk is Jesus for the disenchanted and life-seekers, Buster Casey is just another way to look at a liberator. If you can't put faith into the accounts of Buster Casey, then what can you put faith in?