Regardless of what you think of it, the new-in-paperback Chuck Palahniuk’s RANT: AN ORAL BIOGRAPHY OF BUSTER CASEY will screw with your head. And I don’t just mean shock you, but really mess with it. It’ll cut around your entire scalp, scoop out your brain and wring it dry before putting it back — and not exactly in the same condition.

The Buster Casey of the title is now deceased, and the novel is comprised of nothing more than snippets of interviews with those who knew him, reminiscing about his life. Nicknamed Rant, he was a famous serial killer, but not like a Jeffrey Dahmer or even a Jason Voorhees; he was responsible for a plague-like outbreak of rabies that turns people into zombies of sorts. His infection was brought on by his hobby of purposely getting bit by snakes, spiders and scorpions.

It’s a hobby he picked up as a child — when he wasn’t collecting his own boogers or other children’s teeth — and never grew out of. In fact, having the poison flow through his veins was like Viagra to him. Rant’s also known for his acute sense of smell; one round of oral sex with his slightly deformed girlfriend and he can tell what she ate that day.

After leaving his small hometown and unhappy childhood behind, Rant falls in with a group of people into Party Crashing — a quasi-DEATH RACE 2000 sport in which teams of four cruise the streets in cars, looking for other teams to crash into for kicks – at low-velocity speeds, mind you. (Palahniuk includes no scar-fucking, but probably only because David Cronenberg beat him to it.)

One can tell Palahniuk had a ball teasing readers with the oral-bio structure, divulging the important parts bit by bit on his own terms, and not to the conventions of fiction. You can imagine him smiling in malicious glee as you’re left baffled as to why all the people’s names are accompanied by graphic of either a sun or a moon, leaving it unexplained, yet eventually doling out enough clues for you to figure it out, albeit long down the road.

But just when you suspect RANT may be all about structure, Palahniuk throws in a big twist that upends the story thus far, and takes it somewhere else entirely. It’s a move that could have backfired, but instead — especially after a little too many pages devoted to Party Crashing — it sets the book aflame with excitement. Without revealing the proverbial monkey wrench, it finds the author toying with science fiction, as only he can.

RANT is not for everyone — nothing by Palahniuk is, of course — but those willing to strap in for a wild ride down unpredictable paths will be rewarded with a daring and darkly comic work of originality. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

“He used to wedge his face between my legs and and slip his tongue into me. He’d come up on his elbows, smacking his lips, his chin dripping, and Rant would say, ‘You ate something with cinnamon for breakfast …’ He’d lick his lips and roll his eyes, saying, ‘Not French toast … something else.’ Rant would snort and gobble, then come up with his eyes shining, saying, ‘For breakfast, you drank a cup of Constant Comment tea. That’s the cinnamon.’ From just the smell and taste of me, he’d nail my whole day.”

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• HAUNTED by Chuck Palahniuk