Full disclosure: Chuck Palahniuk is my favorite fiction author. However, I’ve been disappointed by his books before (see my review of Haunted). Rant is the best Chuck book since Choke. The novel follows the life of Buster Casey. Beyond that, the content is hard to summarize. It’s about a gang of youths who crash cars for fun. It’s about a nationwide rabies epidemic. It’s about time travel. (Seriously). It’s about poisonous spiders. It’s about a future dystopia where people get their kicks off of plugging data into ports in the back of their heads and people are separated into two classes: daytimers and nighttimers.

The first thing you’ll notice when reading rant is the format. It’s told in first person by dozens of narrators. At first, it seems complicated, but read on. It makes perfect sense and understanding who says what comes naturally after a few chapters. Chuck takes the risk of having dozens of narrators describe one character instead of the other way around. Somehow, he pulls it off and creates a compelling story with everything you’d expect from a Palahnik book. Examples include mindfuck revelations in the last few chapters, anti-heroes with comedic ways of extorting money from people, half-true science fiction that will have you seeking out the truth to the wild claims.

Does snake venom really have such a dramatic effect on the male genitalia? Can someone with heightened senses truly figure out what a woman ate for dinner a week ago by performing oral sex on her? Do human rabies victims who refuse treatment eventually grave human flesh?

All this and more. Finally Palahniuk is back on track. Expect gruesome anecdotes and heaping amounts of anarchy. How does he come up with this shit?