WELCOME to Middleton, redneck hicksville, a midwestern town where dogs go crazy for wind-scattered sanitary towels and used condoms snag on the barbed-wire fence. Bent over the same wire, Rant . . . aka Buster . . .Casey will inspect the rubbers and identify their owners on smell alone. This novel starts out like The Wasp Factory rewritten by a deranged student on a creative writing course taught by William Burroughs and JG Ballard.

So far, so enjoyable, reader response veering between disgusted grimace and ear-to-ear grin. Rant creates a rainbow of snot on his bedroom wall, reaching up to thumb freshly rolled bogeys to the paintwork.

His mother has him painting Easter eggs. "That's a beautiful pineapple, " she tells him. "Ain't a pineapple, " Rant replies. "It's an MK2 fragmentation grenade."

The kid's father doesn't fare much better. Rant plays a trick involving food dyes and underpants that will have you squirming in horrified delight.

The contents of Rant's pants become the focus when Chuck Palahniuk reveals, by means of his chosen form of the patchwork oral history, the motivation behind his taste for black-widow spider venom. A common symptom, according to historian Green Taylor Simms, one of many characters petitioned for memories of Rant, is priapism:

"It's nature's cure for erectile dysfunction."

Around halfway through, without wishing to spoil the fun, the novel turns into something much more interesting: say, Ballard's Crash spliced with Jeff Noon's Falling Out of Cars, a dash of Toby Litt's trauma-porn and an Americanised dusting of M John Harrison's fetish for customised Cosworths.

Yet strangely, as the novel gets into the fast-cars phase in which "Nighttimers" play deadly dodgems in beaten-up bangers, the narrative slows down. Partly it's due to repetition, which may be deliberate, given the interest in trance-like states, and partly the form. The novel has forward momentum but can lack narrative drive.

There are moments of lyrical writing. Green Taylor Simms again: "All of my automobile accidents have felt similar, like swimming through amber or honey. A moment unspools for years, time almost stops."

Time, in fact, is crucial to one reading of the book. The multiplicity of voices ensures several different readings are possible. If you finish it slightly unsure as to who Rant was and whether he even existed, that may be part of the point.