Reading Chuck Palahniuk is like riding a roller coaster. It's fast and furious, with unexpected twists, turns and loops.
April 29, 2007 (Press Release) --
Sometimes you want to put your hands over your eyes; sometimes you can't help but look. Sometimes you feel like throwing up; sometimes you can't help shrieking in delight.
And when it's over, you want to ride again, sometimes against your better judgment.
Palahniuk (pronounced Pol-a-nick) has become a cult hero to the devoted readers of his comic blend of the grotesque, violent, subversive and futuristic. He became famous with the publication -- and especially Brad Pitt's movie version -- of Fight Club, the story of a secret society of young men who beat the living daylights out of each other in an attempt to feel alive in a stultifying world of bland conformity.
Now comes Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. It's a collection of reminiscences of fictional friends, enemies and observers who try to answer the question: Who was Buster "Rant" Casey?
Was he a serial killer--"America's Walking Talking Weapon of Mass Destruction?" A twisted turn on Huck Finn, teaching people to be alive and free and resist "some assembly-line, second-hand, hand-me-down life?"
Or a mama's boy whose life proves "every family is a regular little cult?"
On the surface, the fictional Rant Casey is America's "kissing killer." He is a wanted fugitive responsible for spreading rabies -- with a kiss -- throughout the population.
It starts when he is a small-town boy, bored and dissatisfied, rejecting the "bull----- nature of everything" around him. "That night, even as a little boy, Rant Casey just wanted one thing: to be real," a friend says. "Even if that real thing was stinking blood and guts."
His eccentric search for authenticity takes him to the wilderness, where he plunges his arms and legs underground so that snakes and other animals can bite them. The surge of rabies through his bloodstream is a high, a sexual experience, a religious epiphany.
A friend remembers "both of us trickling blood out of little holes in our hands and feet and watching the blood leak out on the sand under the hot sun. Rant said, 'This here, as far as I am concerned, is how church should feel.' "
Rant wants to share the feeling, and he does, indiscriminately, with friends and classmates (the nickname Rant comes from the sound they make in the throes of a rabies infection), and more than a few girlfriends.
The descriptions of rabies are clinical, graphic and gross -- vintage Palahniuk. But rabies -- Palahnuik's symbol for resistance and independence -- is strangely liberating, too.
Source: http://www.msn.com
And when it's over, you want to ride again, sometimes against your better judgment.
Palahniuk (pronounced Pol-a-nick) has become a cult hero to the devoted readers of his comic blend of the grotesque, violent, subversive and futuristic. He became famous with the publication -- and especially Brad Pitt's movie version -- of Fight Club, the story of a secret society of young men who beat the living daylights out of each other in an attempt to feel alive in a stultifying world of bland conformity.
Now comes Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey. It's a collection of reminiscences of fictional friends, enemies and observers who try to answer the question: Who was Buster "Rant" Casey?
Was he a serial killer--"America's Walking Talking Weapon of Mass Destruction?" A twisted turn on Huck Finn, teaching people to be alive and free and resist "some assembly-line, second-hand, hand-me-down life?"
Or a mama's boy whose life proves "every family is a regular little cult?"
On the surface, the fictional Rant Casey is America's "kissing killer." He is a wanted fugitive responsible for spreading rabies -- with a kiss -- throughout the population.
It starts when he is a small-town boy, bored and dissatisfied, rejecting the "bull----- nature of everything" around him. "That night, even as a little boy, Rant Casey just wanted one thing: to be real," a friend says. "Even if that real thing was stinking blood and guts."
His eccentric search for authenticity takes him to the wilderness, where he plunges his arms and legs underground so that snakes and other animals can bite them. The surge of rabies through his bloodstream is a high, a sexual experience, a religious epiphany.
A friend remembers "both of us trickling blood out of little holes in our hands and feet and watching the blood leak out on the sand under the hot sun. Rant said, 'This here, as far as I am concerned, is how church should feel.' "
Rant wants to share the feeling, and he does, indiscriminately, with friends and classmates (the nickname Rant comes from the sound they make in the throes of a rabies infection), and more than a few girlfriends.
The descriptions of rabies are clinical, graphic and gross -- vintage Palahniuk. But rabies -- Palahnuik's symbol for resistance and independence -- is strangely liberating, too.
Source: http://www.msn.com
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