The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel [Hardcover]

Rick Moody (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 28, 2010

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 classic, "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 the desolation of 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 vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. In the ensuing days, it crawls through the heartbroken wasteland of a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally--a dystopia of lowlife, emigration from America, and laughable lifestyle alternatives.

The Four Fingers of Death is a stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel. It will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

No amount of familiarity with Moody's body of work will prepare a reader for this distressingly impertinent exercise in bafflement. The plot originates in 2024 with Montese Crandall, a blocked writer whose list of woes includes a wife in a coma and an unsavory passion for baseball cards featuring bionically enhanced players, and whose major success is winning the right to author the novelization of the remake of the 1963 horror flick The Crawling Hand. The novelization, then, basically is the book. First, we have the space diaries of Col. Jed Richards, whose mission to Mars goes awry amid machete-wielding colonists, homoerotic encounters with fellow astronauts, and an insidious bacteria. Next, we're back on Earth, swept up in NASA's efforts to curtail the murderous swath of the mission's sole survivor: Colonel Richards's severed arm. All the while, Crandall clears his chest of everything from primate sexuality and megachurches to Mexican wrestlers. The comedy of catharsis ought to be whacked-out good fun. Instead, it is desperately and exceedingly annoying. To accuse Moody's book of inanity is like calling a B-movie's production values thrifty; the inanity is the point. (July)
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From Bookmarks Magazine

A "brick-thick, rock-‘n'-roll-dystopian, fast-and-loose-and-ambitious-as-Pynchon novel" (New York Times Book Review), Moody's latest boldly exhibits its author's talents, including his cheeky creativity, linguistic acrobatics, and eccentric characters. However, this unwieldy fusion of SF satire and postmodern metafiction fell short of the critics' expectations. Nearly all agreed that the novel, at nearly 750 pages, is too long, and they also complained that it is too calculated, too repetitive, too self-indulgent, too rambling, and too clever for its own good. Strained attempts at humor and intentionally poor writing rounded out the collective protest. Though Moody's admirers will likely overlook these weaknesses and enjoy this "grab bag of sardonic fun" (Dallas Morning News), other readers may want to steer clear.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 736 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (July 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316118915
• ISBN-13: 978-0316118910
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 1.8 x 9.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #977,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I was born in NYC and raised in the CT suburbs. One of my grandfathers was a newspaper publisher and the other a small-town GM dealer. I figure this is a good lineage for a writer. I went to school in Rhode Island, where I worked with some really interesting people, like Angela Carter and John Hawkes. And then I got my MFA from Columbia University in NYC. After school I worked in book publishing in New York, during some lean times. My first novel came out in 1992. Since then, I've been writing mostly. I teach now and then. I got married in 2003, to my girlfriend of many years, Amy. She's working on her MA in decorative arts history. We split our time between Brooklyn and a little island off the coast of CT.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 21 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Reading is FUN for the first time in a long time August 18, 2010

By evanjamesroskos VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH will remind you that storytelling is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to stretch the imagination. It's supposed to make you laugh and cringe and cry and smirk and push yourself forward to find out what happens next.

Put simply, I have not had this much fun reading a book -- on nearly every page -- in a long, long time. The second half, especially, feels like a farcical look at contemporary America while the first half has the more gritty suggestion of life during wartime. Truly, this is a book about today and how we got here and what we think we're going as a nation that wants to be optimistic but does pessimistic things. but it's also just a crazy story about the desolation of space travel, paling booths, talking chimps, and a killer bacteria from Mars. And even with all the hilarious, quirky, imaginative chunks, there are some deeply emotional relationships -- some that are variations on the core love affair that helps initiate the whole novelization-within-a-novel plot.

It can be read deeply or not. It can be read slowly or not. But i cannot imagine someone failing to enjoy themselves! I cannot recommend this book enough and yet I hesitate, briefly, because I want everyone I talk to about this book to find it as bizarre and addictive as I do. it's not going to happen, of course, because we all have different needs and interests as readers.

Read it. Let it take its time. It will turn inside out, surprise you, impress you. And you won't have more fun reading anything else. ever.

9 of 13 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A fun book with a lot to say November 8, 2010

By Seckseeguy

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm not too surprised that not everyone liked this book. It's not a straight-on, linear narrative, so that automatically dumbfounds a lot of people. But I am surprised at how dismissive some of the critical reviews are. This book really resonated with me as an exploration of human nature in situations that vary from the highly exaggerated stress of surviving a trip to Mars to the more mundane stress of surviving day-to-day in times of economic uncertainty. Yes, a talking chimp seems like a gimmick, but I loved Morton. He's a great character who deserves to be called by name. Like all good characters, Morton has his flaws, but each time he speaks, he exposes how much human potential is wasted in ego, selfishness and greed. He's definitely someone I would like to know. If you're looking for a book that says comforting things about homo sapiens and the USA, you'll want to move on, but in the end Moody gives us a great essay on what's really important and wonderful about being human. I found this to be a fun, adventurous book with a lot of serious and important content.

18 of 27 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Rick Moody's Best Novel: A Grand, Glorious Celebration of Science Fiction and Horror August 1, 2010

By John Kwok HALL OF FAMEVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

"The Four Fingers of Death", Rick Moody's latest novel, is not just the best novel from the greatest living writer of my generation. It is a superb work of science fiction in its own right; a most elegant blend of interplanetary space opera and horror, set amidst a near future dystopian southwestern United States that bears more than a passing glimpse to our own. Dedicated to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, the novel really reads more like a literary tribute to the legendary Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" with more than a passing nod to Neal Stephenson's late work ("Cryptonomicon", "The Baroque Cycle"). With "The Four Fingers of Death", Rick Moody joins such eminent mainstream writers as Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing in demonstrating that he, like them, has become well-versed in the literary traditions of science fiction.

"The Four Fingers of Death" is a literary triptych; three separate novels all merged into one. First is the near future tale that opens and closes this novel of hard on his luck writer Montese Crandall, who wins the right to write a novelization of the 2025 remake of the classic 1963 horror film "The Crawling Hand". The other two books comprise his "novelization". The first book, chronicling the interplanetary trek to Mars and the subsequent exploration of the Red Planet by a doomed team of American astronauts, is Moody at his Bradburyesque best. Moody's evocation of interplanetary space travel is one of the finest accounts I've seen written in science fiction, rendered in a cinema verite-like style. The second book is an exhilarating, often darkly humorous, descent into horror, as we, the readers, are immersed in the trail of death and destruction left by the "Four Fingers of Death", set largely within the Rio Blanco (actually Tucson), Arizona cityscape. It's also a smart, often witty, and dystopic, look at our own immediate future (maybe the present), with Moody's literary commentary ranging from alternative lifestyles to the philosophical observations of human-animal relations from the very mouth of a talking chimpanzee.

I found "The Four Fingers of Death" impossible to put down. This is a great work of literary fiction which deserves a wide readership from both mainstream and traditional science fiction literary audiences. If nothing else, "The Four Fingers of Death" should remind readers that there exists now - as well as in the past - a great treasure trove of literary riches awaiting anyone who is unfamiliar with the history and literary traditions of science fiction. Definitely one of the finest works of fiction published this year and a work which demonstrates finally, at last, that Rick Moody was not merely a student of John Hawkes, but also of Angela Carter, at Brown University.