The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel - Hardcover

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.

"A rollicking romp... improbable and thoroughly entertaining, courtesy of master storyteller Moody...Brings in dozens of characters...and not a one of them wasted; as he gamely intertwines their destinies, he switches mood, voice register and generally has a grand old time twitting the conventions of science fiction and literary narrative alike...A smart, fun satire--Jonathan Swift in space, with twists befitting Vincent Price." (Kirkus)

"Rick Moody's latest novel is a riotous gloss on an already forgotten flourish of presidential theatre: George W. Bush's 2004 announcement that the United States would send a manned mission to Mars...Moody imagines a 2025 NASA expedition to the Red Planet and conjures a not-so-distant future that is less a forecast of the world we are soon to inhabit than a fantasia drawn from early-century jitters about national demise....Moody's comic tour de force encompasses scavenger survivalists, careerists NASA functionaries, a weak and peripatetic president, and a DeLillo-esque mass spiritual movement called the omnium gatherum, whose desert conclave supplies the backdrop for the denouement....Animated by Moody's inventive energies and dark wit, the novel is neither gloomy nor grim, preoccupied though it is with infection, contagion, and death....Like any American writer worth his salt, Moody traffics in ambiguous symbols, and the diseased arm possesses the fraught doubleness of an emblem out of Hawthorne, a writer at the center of his 2002 memoir, The Black Veil....Conceptual wizardry and resonance are not reconciled with ease, nor do many writers attempt such a rapprochement, so it is here, in the intersection of narrative excess and genuine feeling, that Moody is at his most daring and arresting." (BookForum James Gibbons)

"Wacky, wonderful imaginings." (More Magazine)

"Like Vonnegut, Moody packs his novel with weird New Age pseudo-cults, odd philosophies, bizarre science experiments and one-off characters who chatter at you for a dozen pages before getting strangled by a severed arm with four fingers." (i09.com Charlie Jane Anders)

"Combines Kurt Vonnegut's masterly black humor with the apocalyptic scenery of B-movies and the postmodern playfulness of Neal Stephenson." (Library Journal Henry L. Carrigan)

"In The Four Fingers of Death, Rick Moody's rollicking shaggy-dog novel (a mixed breed of science fiction and satire), a sorry writer bangs out the novelization of a campy 60s horror film, while a severed human arm, the sole survivor of an ill-starred mission to Mars, creeps across the desert." (Vanity Fair Elissa Schappell)

"700-plus pages of wacky, wonderful imaginings: there's a rare collection of baseball cards, three space pods inhabited by nine American astronauts and a lonely human arm which crawls through civilization." (More )

"This is Moody uncorked, slyly going back to the wordy, toothsome, 19th century novel, with a science-fiction twist." (Los Angeles Times Salter Reynolds)

"For readers who enjoy rambling, picaresque adventures with a satiric edge (think: Thomas Pynchon), it's...a blast." (Richmond Times-Dispatch Doug Childers)

"Set in an America even bleaker than the '70s of The Ice Storm Moody's latest is a comic sci-fi epic....His tale is filled with digressions that reveal a sad future we may soon inherit." (San Antonio Express-News)