In the works by Palahniuk that fail, particularly Lullaby and Rant, the failure seems to stem from the fact that there are a couple of good ideas that just don't mesh with one another. Lullaby starts with promise and turns into a road novel with annoying characters. With Rant, there's a rabies plague, an unknown near-future where people only live during the day or during the night, a title-character billed as the most efficient serial killer ever, and some time travel.

What's worse, in Rant, nothing's unexpected. Even the time-traveling -- potentially the twist Palahniuk thought would give the book it's punch -- is mentioned in the dust jacket. Still, the opening few pages (as someone pointed out in another review) essentially reveal what's going on. Anyone reading carefully enough would know what's about to happen. Usually Palahniuk's style and shock tactics would be enough to get one through this, but not this time. And even if the time traveling was a surprise it would be just one more bizarre element in a book of bizarre elements that really don't tie together. And some of the elements are recycled from previous efforts. The party-crashing, for instance, is just something that he touched on in Fight Club (the thrill of the car crash leading to a religious feeling). If he didn't spend so much prose on what crashing "means" to these characters (since it's essentially the same for all of them) then the book might not sag in the middle, right when Rant's escape from his small town begins. Recycling the car crash thing isn't a big deal -- it's his idea, he can reuse it and expand it if he likes. But the oral biography device he uses leads to repetition and the novel ends up more a pile of sticks than any coherent structure, veering off into ideas when the characters are begging to do something.

Ultimately, I'm really disappointed in the fact that Rant doesn't really get developed in the novel. It's more a novel about the world Palahniuk has created than Rant. And yet that world isn't very deep or interesting. The 'city life' Rant escapes to is nothing more than a series of car crashes. The great effect he has on his fellow party crashers must be taken on faith -- it's really not shown in the prose. Rant is just someone who was around, a weird someone. there's mention that he applied for status as a citizen of the night, but there's no sense of why or what that means for him. The segregation, the plague, the world itself is flat.

I'm glad that his style has evolved a bit. The energy of Choke's repetitions has given way in Diary and Rant to a less frantic approach, which allows for deeper characterization and less reliance on dialog. Except that Rant is, essentially, all dialog that, especially in the second half, all sounds the same. There are very few characters that actually sound different. I wonder what the novel would be like as a traditional narrative? I'm not asking for a different version -- clearly Palahniuk was challenging himself here. But I struggled through the last hundred pages and after the unreadable Haunted, this makes 2 disappointments in a row (and 3 out of the last 4) for an author whom I had previously bought without question. I will keep reading, and maybe my lowered expectations will be rewarded.