The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel

New
Paperback
2011
$31.25

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 film, 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 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 Arizona desert. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. It's crawl through the heartbroken wasteland of civilization is recorded in this stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel.

Synopsis

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 film, 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 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 Arizona desert. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. It's crawl through the heartbroken wasteland of civilization is recorded in this stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel.

$31.25

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 752
Edition: Reprint
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 13 Jul 2011
ISBN 10: 0316118931
ISBN 13: 9780316118934

Media Reviews

[A] comic tour de force...Moody is at his most daring and arresting. -- BookForum Moody's powers of invention, his ease in his own prose, his ability to develop interesting characters--in short, his enormous gifts as a writer--are on full display here. And when he wants to write a gorgeous paragraph, he delivers as you know he can, even when he's still spoofing. -- The New York Times Book Review A grab bag of sardonic fun. -- The Dallas Morning News Moody's foremost accomplishment...Moves with unapologetic swagger, as it flaunts the extremes of storytelling. -- Bookslut As pulpy... as The Four Fingers of Death might sound, it's oddly something sweeter and more profound. -- Associated Press Comic, grim, tender and masterful. -- Bloomberg Sci-fi as only Moody could write it--in turns touching and outrageous. -- Very Short List, The Observer 700-plus pages of wacky, wonderful imaginings. -- More Entertaining and often poignant. -- The New Yorker

Author Bio

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.