The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel - Softcover

Moody, Rick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316118931 ISBN 13: 9780316118934

Publisher: Back Bay Books, 2011

Synopsis

Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror film, The Crawling Hand. Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.

Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the Arizona desert. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. It's crawl through the heartbroken wasteland of civilization is recorded in this stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel.

About this title

About the Author

THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH is Rick Moody's ninth book. He has received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award, the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Paris Review's Aga Khan Prize, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, NY.

From Booklist

This gargantuan comic novel comes with a high concept and a complicated backstory. In the year 2025, Montese Crandall has won the rights to pen a novelization of the remake of the 1963 drive-in classic The Crawling Arm. His resulting opus first describes a mission to Mars that goes disastrously awry when the astronauts sink into drug addiction, inappropriate sex, and murder. The lone astronaut to make it back to earth, realizing that he is infected with deadly Martian bacteria, blows up his spaceship. All that remains is his crawling, infected arm, which proceeds to make its way across a blighted Arizona. Moody’s outrageous plot reflects his love of cheesy science fiction and allows him to tweak the conventions of the genre while also launching acerbic commentary on a future U.S. in which gated communities have seceded from a nation reeling from pollution, crime, and a “parboiled” economy. While he’s at it, he also fleshes out dozens and dozens of characters, including a chimpanzee, and has a great time channeling angst-ridden teen-speak as well as the bureaucratese of mid-level NASA administrators. The novel may prove to be an exhausting experience for fans of Moody’s early books; instead, it reads like the giddy creation of the bastard child of the two Toms—that would be Robbins and Pynchon. --Joanne Wilkinson

About this edition

• Publisher: Back Bay Books
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0316118931
• ISBN 13: 9780316118934
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 752