Chuck Palahniuk at Coolidge Corner

Chuck Palahniuk will be reading from Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey at Brookline Booksmith, Friday, May 11, at 5:00 pm, at Coolidge Corner Theater. Tickets are available from Brookline Booksmith for $2.

Palahniuk tries his hand at a new genre for him - the oral history, which compiles other people's thoughts on a famous person. The character at the center of all these quotations is Buster "Rant" Casey, who is a connoisseur of animal bites and who eventually unleashes rabies upon the world.

According to the "Government File" on the book's elaborate website, Buster Landru "Rant" Casey loves "Fishing," or "sticking his hand into various animal burrows with the intent of being bit, in order to build a tolerance to all disease and poisons - a strange 'elixir of life' to his ghastly way of living."

Palahniuk also borrows from JG Ballard's Crash with this one. Rant also helms a group of destructive teenagers who like to "Party Crash," driving their cars into each other. There's the search for feeling through pain a la Fight Club, along with a time-travel twist.

Palahniuk, who works the Web like no other author, is also building an oral history about himself, and you can enter a memory you have about Palahniuk. Of course, the memory can be truth or fiction.

By the way, we called Brookline Booksmith last night, and they said only a few tickets are left and they're "going quick."

Image of Rant cover from Amazon.