Novel: Rant

Overview
Rant: An Oral Biography of Buster Casey presents the rise, disappearance, and possible reinvention of a backwoods troublemaker who becomes an urban folk legend, a public-health catastrophe, and maybe something stranger. Told as a collage of interviews with friends, enemies, parents, lovers, doctors, and law officers, the book assembles competing testimonies about Buster “Rant” Casey, a boy with feral appetites and preternatural senses whose life triggers a cultural rupture. The voices never align into a single, verified account; instead they produce a mosaic of rumor, confession, and myth.

Form and World
The story unfolds in a near-future America governed by curfews and a rigid split between Daytimers and Nighttimers, a division enforced by employment schedules, surveillance, and public-health policies. Media streams and official narratives shape perception, while underground subcultures hack daily life for intensity. The oral-history form turns history into hearsay, making every fact provisional and every memory suspect.

Rant’s Early Life
Raised in a rural town, Rant displays an extravagant sense of smell and taste that draws him toward dangerous stimuli. He actively seeks spider and snake bites, chases roadkill, and stages elaborate pranks that infect the town with stories as much as with vermin. His charisma and appetite attract followers and alarmed adults in equal measure. Gossip swirls around his parentage, an old small-town trauma, and a mysterious stranger linked to his mother’s past. By the time he leaves for the city, he has already blurred the line between boyhood mischief and something like plague.

City Arrival and Party Crashing
In the metropolis Rant drifts into the Nighttimer world and the outlaw sport called Party Crashing, an after-hours, moving demolition derby with agreed rules, coded decals, and a points economy. He falls in with drivers like Echo Lawrence and Shot Dunyun, whose testimonials sketch a scene built on ritual risk and communal bravado. Rant’s gift for finding extremes makes him a star, and his presence accelerates the sport from contact to sacrament. He disables airbags, aims for specific angles, and treats collisions as a way to puncture routine reality.

Rabies and Social Upheaval
Rant contracts rabies and becomes a super-spreader, whether by recklessness, intention, or both. The disease heightens sensation, unchains inhibitions, and travels mouth-to-mouth through the Nighttimer network, then beyond. As infection rates spike, authorities impose draconian quarantines, summary executions, and deeper segregation of day and night. Party Crashing mutates into something like a viral church, with Rant a patient zero turned folk saint or terrorist depending on the witness. Public panic, official propaganda, and ecstatic testimony collide, making truth a casualty of contagion.

Time, Parentage, and Disappearance
A figure named Green Taylor Simms advances a forbidden theory: precisely engineered crashes at peak velocity can punch holes in time. Rumors spread that “historians” are already using collisions to revise the past. Woven through testimonies about Rant’s lovers and rivals are hints that he learns the technique, that he dies in a spectacular wreck, and that no body is recovered. The interviews point to a looping paradox in which the mysterious man from his mother’s past might be Rant himself, making him both progenitor and descendant. Whether this is conspiracy, metaphor, or literal physics remains unresolved inside the chorus of voices.

Legacy and Themes
The book leaves Rant suspended between martyr and hoax, disease and cure, outlaw sportsman and time-traveling ancestor. It explores how stories spread like pathogens, how systems enforce normalcy, and how people will crash the present to escape it. The oral form refuses a single verdict, suggesting that identity, history, and family are assembled from competing memories the way a demolition derby car is built from scavenged parts.