Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey is widely known as one of Chuck Palahniuk's trickiest reads, a mind-blowing "out there" novel in what is generally considered a very extreme novel bibliography . The unconventional narrative style, plethora of contradictory narrators, and indecipherable subject matter all combine into a single oral biography of a complex and incomprehensible man named Buster "Rant" Casey, a man who enjoyed being bitten by poisonous animals, a man who could discern a person's life story from the sweat of their flesh, and a man who, even after death, taught us how we will always be slightly different versions of ourselves to different people. The novel begins with a car dealer's memories on a plane as he sees the person he will have to sit with for the duration of the flight: a hillbilly cowboy with arms so badly scarred that, as in a car accident, he cannot do without staring at it. He soon learns that this terrifying man is, in fact, Chet Casey: the father of the infamous Buster Casey, the late maniac Nighttimer who was the "superspreader" of a rabies epidemic that swept the nation. And so begins the biography of Rant Casey. From there, the book chronicles Rant's childhood antics, from him actively seeking out rabid dogs to bite him and transmit rabies to him while he faked a chronic erection to get out of school. He walked the neighborhoods in his Boy Scout outfit to find stash after stash of rare, uncirculated million-dollar coins, then used this money to turn around the economy of his small town, Middleton. In one memorable incident, Rant was in charge of providing the "scare factors" of the local annual haunted house, such as brains or cooked elbow macaroni mixed with cold butter and eyeball ... middle of paper ... ... or be his parents, to gain power. And, from this, we can assume that Rant, Chet, and Green Taylor Simms are, in fact, the same person. Yet, Simms traveled back in time to rape Irene, Hattie, and Esther Casey, while Rant and Chet went back in time to save those same women. Palahniuk's Rant-Chet-Simms, therefore, is an exaggerated physical representation of a person's different personas in front of different members of society. Rant's oral biography is a character study. Palahniuk took the different versions of people in society and expanded them, making them so exaggerated that they became different people with different names. Yet, this whole confusing and complicated mess comes together to teach the same lesson: no one will ever truly know a person for who they are. After all, as Rant said, “You're a different human being to everyone you meet” (18).