Changes

''Rant'' tells the tale of Rant Casey, born in the redneck town of Middleton to develop an animal bite addiction, become an urban legend and likely a Patient Zero of pan-American rabies epidemic. He leaves Middleton to find his real father in the big, bad city, where he gets involved in a underground game of Party Crashing, where parties dressed in clothes and cars chosen according to the 'flag' of the night meet up to hunt and bump into each other in a game of controlled fender bending.

''Rant'' is mostly a commentary on the angst of 20-somethings, uncomfortably numb with consumer culture, but there is also a bit of a satire on red neck America, and an attempt to explore the nature of celebrity and the arising of religious or quasi religious mythologies within non-mainstream culture. There is also a cute subculture of car-bumping game of Party Crashing and a nice line on conspiracy theories, unfortunately only appearing at the very end. As seems quite common with American novels, one of the important deeper themes of ''Rant'' is the combination of the fear of death and the notion of either taming, controlling or conquering death mixed with the perception of 'normal', 'mainstream' life as artificially blunted and sweetened. The book panders to the rather naive idea that the 'real' life is invariably rough, edgy, sharp and brutal, that being bitten by a Black Widow is inherently more 'real' than smelling roses. Palahniuk's characters also seem to believe that by the sheer engagement in mildly destructive activities (bumping into each others' cars at not more than 20 mph, carefully marked as not to hurt unengaged bystanders) is, by itself, a subversive and anarchic activity. Which is a bit like saying that shooting up will lead to revolution, only tamer. We can, of course, read the whole story of [[Party Crashers]] as a satire on pseudo-rebelliousness, this reading is even cued (and then denied) in the text itself.