The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody

Book Description
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.

My thoughts
The Four Fingers of Death is a lengthy book. It actually is three stories in one. The first which begins and ends the book is about Montese Crandall who in the near future has one the right to write the novelization of the sci-fi classic “The Crawling Hand”. (Okay, they think it is a classic in the year 2025). And we find out the importance of why he needs to write this book. The rest of the book is the story he supposedly wrote. It is split into two sections – Book one explains the Mars voyage and which I enjoyed as it was detailed and stimulating. Classic science fiction. Book Two is the story of the return to earth where only a human arm has crashed landed and may be infected and cause the destruction of human kind. This part was humorous horror to say the least, but didn’t grab me as much as the first book. With over 700 pages it took me awhile to get through this one.


Note: This book was borrowed from my local library.