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Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey by Chuck Palahniuk |
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1—An Introduction Wallace Boyer (Car Salesman):Like most people, I didn’t meet and talk to Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of close friends just explodes. A dead celebrity can’t walk down the street without meeting a million best buddies he never met in real life. Dying was the best career move Jeff Dahmer and John Wayne Gacy ever made. After Gaetan Dugas was dead, the number of sex partners saying they’d fucked him, it went through the roof. The way Rant Casey used to say it: Folks build a reputation by attacking you while you’re alive—or praising you after you ain’t. For me, I was sitting on an airplane, and some hillbilly sits down next to me. His skin, it’s the same as any car wreck you can’t not stare at—dented with tooth marks, pitted and puckered, the skin on the back of his hands looks one godawful mess. The flight attendant, she asks this hillbilly what’s it he wants to drink. The stewardess asks him to, please, reach my drink to me: scotch with rocks. But when I see those monster fingers wrapped around the plastic cup, his chewed–up knuckles, I could never touch my lips to the rim. With the epidemic, a person can’t be too careful. At the airport, right beyond the metal detector we had to walk through, a fever monitor like they first used to control the spread of SARS. Most people, the government says, have no idea they're infected. Somebody can feel fine, but if that monitor beeps that your temperature's too high, you’ll disappear into quarantine. Maybe for the rest of your life. No trial, nothing. To be safe, I only fold down my tray table and take the cup. I watch the scotch turn pale and watery. The ice melt and disappear. Anybody makes a livelihood selling cars will tell you: Repetition is the mother of all skills. You build the gross at your dealership by building rapport. Anywhere you find yourself, you can build your skills. A good trick to remember a name is you look the person in the eyes long enough to register their color: green or brown or blue. You call that a Pattern Interrupt: It stops you forgetting the way you always would. This cowboy stranger, his eyes look bright green. Antifreeze green. That whole connecting flight between Peco Junction and the city, we shared an armrest, me at the window, him on the aisle. Don’t shoot the messenger, but dried shit keeps flaking off his cowboy boots. Those long sideburns maybe scored him pussy in high school, but they’re gray from his temple to his jawbone now. Not to mention those hands. To practice building rapport, I ask him what he paid for his ticket. If you can’t determine the customer needs, identify the hot buttons, of some stranger rubbing arms with you on an airplane, you’ll never talk anybody into taking “mental ownership” of a Nissan, much less a Cadillac. For landing somebody in a car, another trick is: Every car on your lot, you program the number–one radio–station button to gospel music. The number–two button, set to rock and roll. The number–three, to jazz. If your prospect looks like a demander–commander type, the minute you unlock the car you set the radio to come on with the news or a politics talk station. A sandal wearer, you hit the National Public Radio button. When they turn the key, the radio tells them what they want to hear. Every car on the lot, I have the number–five button set to that techno–raver garbage in case some kid who does Party Crashing comes around. The green color of the hillbilly’s eyes, the shit on his boots, salesmen call those “ “Like most people I didn’t meet Rant Casey until after he was dead. That’s how it works for most celebrities: After they croak, their circle of friends just explodes.…” Rantis the mind-bending new novel from Chuck Palahniuk, the literary provocateur responsible for such books as the generation-defining classicFight Cluband the pedal-to-the-metal horrorfestHaunted. It takes the form of an oral history of one Buster “Rant” Casey, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of our time. “What ‘Typhoid Mary’ Mallon was to typhoid, what Gaetan Dugas was to AIDS, and Liu Jian-lun was to SARS, Buster Casey would become for rabies.” A high school rebel who always wins (and a childhood murderer?), Rant Casey escapes from his small hometown of Middleton for the big city. He becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. On appointed nights participants recognize one another by such designated car markings as “Just Married” toothpaste graffiti and then stalk and crash into each other. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. Their collected anecdotes explore the possibility that his saliva caused a silent urban plague of rabies and that he found a way to escape the prison house of linear time.… “The future you have, tomorrow, won’t be the same future you had, yesterday.” —Rant Casey Expect hilarity, 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. Buster “Rant” Casey just may be the most efficient serial killer of our time. A high school rebel, Rant Casey escapes from his small town home for the big city where he becomes the leader of an urban demolition derby called Party Crashing. Rant Casey will die a spectacular highway death, after which his friends gather the testimony needed to build an oral history of his short, violent life. With hilarity, horror, and blazing insight,Rantis a mind-bending vision of the future, as only Chuck Palahniuk could ever imagine. “One of the most feverish imaginations in American letters. . . . More than your weekly prescribed dose of humor and humanity, cleverness and outrage.” —The Washington Post “Brilliant. . . extremely fun. . . . With his love of contemporary fairytales that are gritty and dirty rather than pretty, Palahniuk is the likeliest inheritor of Vonnegut's place in American writing.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Mr. Palahniuk doesn't write for tourists. He writes for hard-core devotees drawn to the wild, angry imagination on display and the taboo-busting humor.” —The New York Times “Unpredictably hilarious. . . . The writing is vivid, raw, and mordantly knowing.” —Chicago Sun-Times “Truly unique. He writes at the edge of crazy, and you can feel his desperate urge to get at the truth of things.” —The Seattle Times “Twisted? Come on, it's Palahniuk. Impossible to put down? Same answer.” —Men's Journal “It's a rare novel that's as funny and as brain-bending as this one. Buckle up.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “A white-knuckled what-if,Rantis the author's most idiosyncratic work to date.” —The Fort Worth Star-Telegram “A strong dose of gore and sinewy prose.” —Time Out New York “So funny that your facial muscles soon tire.” —The Guardian Palahniuk's mind-bending new novel takes the form of an oral history of Buster 'Rant' Casey, who may or may not be the most efficient serial killer of the day. |
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Educational Sales Consultant:
Marsha Wipperman (PlanetWyatt)
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