Chuck Palahniuk's latest novel Rant is, first of all, not a rant. It's the fictional oral history of Buster "Rant" Casey, a fearless antihero who enjoys poisonous spider and snake bites yet loves his mom. Though not as creepy as previous novels like the self-injury splatterfest Haunted, or as intense as Fight Club, the story is sprayed with gore and gross-outs. Every time Rant sticks his arm into a hole in the ground or hides dozens of spiders in his jumpsuit and waits to be bitten, I cringe.

Influenced by sci-fi concepts from Aldous Huxley, William Gibson and J.G. Ballard's fetishistic Crash, Palahniuk makes them his own with twists venturing into the supernatural and neuroscientific. When I began reading I wondered how my review might fit with Omni Brain's focus on brain sciences, but I was soon cheered with descriptions of brain jacks and rabies infections in the central nervous system. "Out-cording" is the recording of someone's full sensory experience, a "neural transcription" sold as mass-market entertainment. A "boosted peak" is an out-cording filtered through the sharper senses of a German Shepherd or a baby's unsullied nervous system. But even those boosts grow tiresome to an audience of the not-so-distant future.

What I adore about Palahniuk is his lush imagination. Just as contemporary films are more violent and pr0n is more extreme than a decade or two ago, this novel jabs to revive dulled senses but is more successful than formulaic slasher flicks. It's not easy to shock but there are some jolts encountered by his thrillseeking characters. At the same time, Graphic Traffic reports on car accidents (with details from paramedics) are treated as mundane. Snotballs also play an important role in the plot.

Rant joins a group of boredom chasers called the Party Crashers, who hunt each other's cars in a cross between slam dancing and bumper cars without bumpers. Jaded by boosted peaks, they fester in an underclass of citizens of the night in an engineered society divided by curfews between night and day. Alienation leads to polarization in an overpopulated world. Crack-of-dawn-risers disdain night-dwellers as lazy and "other," and that bigotry fuels a violent class war.

Rant's personal quest for immortality also spreads an epidemic of rabies. Part vampire, part zombie, rabies-infected people lunge at and bite others in turn. The infected are mostly nighttimers, who become targets for daytimers. Parents disown children and cops shoot to kill as the sun rises. With crisis comes climax.

Rant goes out in a high-speed chase with multiple crashes and a flaming Christmas tree on the roof of his car. His final words, broadcast on Graphic Traffic as he screeches off a cliff, "What if reality is nothing but some disease?"

Just how much is society a construction of neurobiology? The novel teases with descriptions of plagues and viruses affecting the brain before asking that question. With Rant's departure and an unusual method of screwing with genetics, it seems possible to escape both the past and the future.