The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel

Rick Moody

Jul 2010 · Sold by Little, Brown

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

I would not say that this book is like Slaughterhouse-Five, etc. The way that Moody gives you some plot or interaction between characters and then digresses in his author's voice to cover everything under the sun that might be related reminds me of Norman Mailer. But of course, Mailer's books are not cool. This book is. Although I get a little peeved with the lengthy dissertations and want Moody to get back to the plot, I'm never bored. I'm on page 670. Who ever thought that a talking chimp would be the most thoughtful and voluble character in a book?

He keeps getting better with every book. When I think this is the best I've ever read he comes out with another mind blower. This one is like a crazy/sci fi/literary/thriller/comedy all rolled in one. Totally original.

About the author

Rick Moody was born in New York City. He attended Brown and Columbia Universities. He is the author of four previous novels: The Four Fingers of Death, Purple America, The Ice Storm, and Garden State, as well as an award-winning memoir and multiple collections of short fiction. Moody is the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and his work has been anthologized in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.