The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel - Softcover

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.

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