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The Four Fingers of Death

3.3 of 5 stars 3.30 · rating details · 435 ratings · 130 reviews

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...more

Hardcover, 725 pages

Published July 28th 2010 by Little, Brown and Company (first published July 8th 2010)

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Jan 25, 2012 Jimmy rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

In 1955, eight years before Thomas Pynchon's V., and two years after Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, a young writer by the name of William Gaddis unleashed a nine-hundred and fifty-six page novel upon the scene of mid-twentieth century literature entitled The Recognitions. The novel itself dealt with the curious theme of artistic forgery, and concerned a young artist by the name of Wyatt Gwyon and his Mephistophelean contract with an American art dealer by the name of Recktall Brown. Als...more

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Feb 17, 2011 Adam added it

I may not finish this book. It's messy. My love of sprawl is well documented, but this needs editing. The really nasty sentences ('there was a third option, in addition to the other two I've mentioned') are too frequent, and there are some longish sections- an email exchange between the novel's novel's blogger/narrator (yes, really) and his daughter comes to mind, as does the homosexual space-sex scene. (An erect dick is a space arm? Really? REALLY, GROWN MAN WRITING THIS BOOK? SPACE ARM?)- whic...more

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Aug 07, 2012 SandHouse rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

I’ve seen in negative reviews for this book that there are complaints of pointless dialogs and tangents. But I realized early on in Book Two that the author is treating each character and aspect of the story as it’s own little novel. So from the homeless guy who you know is going to be dead in mere seconds because he just disrupted the arm’s resting place, to the retarded boy who will laughingly witness his loving brother’s brutal death, to the history of the founding of a strange and seemingly...more

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Nov 15, 2011 Christine Conde rated it 3 of 5 stars

Missing a Finger Could Get Messy

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody. Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2010.

At a hefty 736 pages, Rick Moody somehow made a comic novel not so funny. The book begins in 2024 and tells the story of Montese Crandall, whose collection of baseball cards is no longer enough to keep him afloat. Somehow, Crandall wins the rights to write a novel based on the 2025 remake of 1963’s The Crawling Arm. The story travels all around from Crandall’s attempts to get past w...more Missing a Finger Could Get Messy

The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody. Little, Brown and Company, New York, 2010.

At a hefty 736 pages, Rick Moody somehow made a comic novel not so funny. The book begins in 2024 and tells the story of Montese Crandall, whose collection of baseball cards is no longer enough to keep him afloat. Somehow, Crandall wins the rights to write a novel based on the 2025 remake of 1963’s The Crawling Arm. The story travels all around from Crandall’s attempts to get past writers block to journal entries from Colonel Jed Richards. The book was much longer than I think it had to be and got a little confusing possibly due to that fact.
The main character of the entire story, Montese Crandall, is definitely a likable guy. Unfortunately, he goes through a rough time, as we read in the introduction. He talks about his love for baseball and about the collection of rare cards he has collected over the years. When he begins to speak about his writing, that’s when we truly understand his nature. As a writer, he writes pages and pages about many subjects, including one about George, an organ donor, but revises them until they are just a simple sentence. For example, “He was just a kid.” Although it is very minimalistic, Crandall has a process and we start to understand his writing as we go into his story based on the story of Col. Jed Richards.
I feel that the best part of the entire book was the actual story written by Crandall. I felt that the character Col. Richards was perfectly imperfect. He had flaws that he himself confessed to and quirks that made him a real person. I felt that the journal entries were interesting and because they weren’t written every day, it kept me interested and I wondered what happened during that missing time. Unfortunately, I had become so engulfed in the story about Col. Richards that I had begun to lose interest after his arm had been found in Arizona.
At the end, we are brought back to Crandall’s take on The Crawling Arm. He discusses his process and how he had come to get the rights to the novelization of the film. It is then that I feel that Moody was trying to add a little humor to the entire story. Within the story there had been many laughable situations and comments but they felt effortless. It wasn’t until this final section of the book that I felt that Moody was trying too hard to make Crandall funny. Perhaps that was part of his personality but it just felt a little forced. Also, I had a hard time keeping the story about Crandall together because it was split up and place on opposite ends of the book. I understand the idea of splitting the story but since the book was over 700 pages, it made it hard to remember what happened over 400 pages before.
I did enjoy reading this novel because it did require me to use a little brain power to remember what had happened before. It was much like reading two novels in one which was a different experience for me. I think that some portions of the novel could have been improved on; however, Moody is a wonderful writer and made a futuristic novel relevant to today.
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Jul 19, 2012 Trish rated it 3 of 5 stars

Funny...reading on the Kindle it is harder to get a sense of how long a book is, which is very obvious in the paper world...this book is LONG (I think 700 pages or so)...it is three stories in one (narrator story, two stories "written" by the narrator with related themes, different settings, and different writing styles)...I loved parts of this book - I thought the part that took place on Mars was written in a tight, elegant style that reflected the setting...the story that took place on earth,...more

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Jul 03, 2012 Mysterio2 rated it 4 of 5 stars

Perhaps because I consumed this as an audiobook rather than in written form, I wasn't put off by its rambling, book-within-a-book structure. I found the reading by Chris Patton well-suited to the story's many twists and turns and its mixture of intentional bombast and absurdity.

As to the book itself, I was about to describe it as Burroughs meets Heller meets Heinlein, or something like. But that doesn't really capture my sense of it. It operates on many levels: At its most superficial level it i...more

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Apr 13, 2011 Artie rated it 4 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Rick Moody’s “The Four Fingers of Death” is a sci-fi comedy novel about a sci-fi novel based off of a horror film. It’s probably one of the most metaphysical works of science fiction within the past twenty five years. It is also Rick Moody’s newest release and a self described love letter to Kurt Vonnegut. The book, which takes place in 2025, tells the story of Montese Crandall, an author who has reached rock bottom and is trying to make some money by writing the novelization of a recent remake...more Rick Moody’s “The Four Fingers of Death” is a sci-fi comedy novel about a sci-fi novel based off of a horror film. It’s probably one of the most metaphysical works of science fiction within the past twenty five years. It is also Rick Moody’s newest release and a self described love letter to Kurt Vonnegut. The book, which takes place in 2025, tells the story of Montese Crandall, an author who has reached rock bottom and is trying to make some money by writing the novelization of a recent remake of the 1963 movie “The Crawling Hand”. Most of the book is the novelization written by Crandall, with his own excerpts inserted into the novel. It’s a trippy concept, but it allows Moody to have multiple characters, and make the omnipresent voice an actual character. The Four Fingers of Death (The Book within the book) is about an astronaut’s diseased disembodied hand, with one finger removed, crash landing on Earth where it proceeds to strangle and murder its way across the desert. This book is mental jog to read through, as you have to not only take into account all the actions of the characters with in the “novelization” but also consider Crandall’s own mindset which permeates the entire select. This style of writing could easily fall apart, become muddled, or just plain convoluted, and at times it does. The book is almost brick like so when the plot just drags along, it does suffer for it, but luckily these are few and far between. It’s my opinion that the greatest asset this book has is its Characters. There are so many weird and wonderful people in this book, many who are just on off characters to advance the plot. No matter how small the role though, they all have unique personalities that sticks with the reader. Jed Richards is the astronaut who contributes the hand with the four fingers of death, but it’s his love story with fellow astronaut, Jim Rose that makes him memorable, or Bix Rafferty, a desert dwelling bum who first meets the killer hand. None of these people truly impacted me or the book as much as the “Author” Montese Crandall. Montese Crandall is a man at the edge of his rope. His wife is dying from lung failure, he is a total failure as a writer, and his greatest achievement consists of boiling down complex stories to a simple five or six word sentence; which leads to my favorite theme and trick of the book. Crandall is a guy who claims to specialize in short sentences, but as it stands he is writing one of the most massive and wordy sci-fi novelizations of all time. It’s as his grief and depression has unlocked the floodgates inside, and he just pours it all on the page. This allows Moody to give his thoughts on a huge range of subjects, from the deconstruction of the American economy, to cybernetic baseball players, to an extended discussion about duct tape. There are very few subjects not talked about. This is used to great effect in not only showing the mindset of Crandall, but also it giving glimpses of the hugely realized future. All the anger and despair Crandall feels over his wife are easily felt in the book. A silly horror story reeks of his depression and heartbreak. Love seems doomed throughout. Our first protagonist falls in love with his fellow astronaut, but they are both brutally killed. Once the eponymous hand lands on Earth, it cuts a swath through every single tragic romance one can think of. Everyone seems tinged with despair and a sense of fatalism. This is where Moody’s comedy shines the brightest, when he is dealing with the death and destruction. While most writers deal with those subjects with a sense of fatalism, Moody gives us some lightness. He makes no attempt to hide his disdain for our new culture, where everything is bite sized and everyone is numb. Instead he accepts it and attempts, no matter how grimly, how people could just be happy with one another. I seem to be heaping a lot of praise on this book, but it is not without its faults. At times it is increasingly wordy, and it really does drag the book down. The aforementioned discussion about duct tape really does go on about a paragraph too long, and I found myself skimming ahead to the end of the paragraph. Another thing that was unfortunate is the humor. This is a dark comedy but for a lot of the time it is not a laugh out loud read. Crandall litters his book with cringe worthy jokes that fall flat and extend the length of the novel. Now this could be Moody doing this on purpose to really illustrate how pathetic Crandall really is, or it could just be forced humor. Either way it really slows down the book. The funniest moments come naturally and from the characters themselves. What I am taking away from this book is that humor is something that cannot be forced, and that it’s the smallest details about characters lives or personas that really make them stick. As a final note, I mentioned earlier that this book was dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut, and it’s almost a tribute to the man’s work. They bare a ton of similarities, although it’s less stealing and more homage on Moody’s part. So basically you can disregard this entire review, if you like Vonnegut odds are you will thoroughly enjoy this book. (less)

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Apr 06, 2011 Katie Paulson rated it 2 of 5 stars

“The Four Fingers of Death”
by Rick Moody
Little, Brown and Company
New York, 2010

“The Four Fingers of Death” is, at best, a messy novel. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as that style can appeal to just as many people as it turns off. The protagonist is Montese Crandall, a struggling writer whose only real success thus far is writing the novelization of a trashy sci-fi movie (The Crawling Hand, an actual 60’s flick) – this novelization comes to be the book itself. The book is hefty, weighing i...more “The Four Fingers of Death”
by Rick Moody
Little, Brown and Company
New York, 2010

“The Four Fingers of Death” is, at best, a messy novel. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as that style can appeal to just as many people as it turns off. The protagonist is Montese Crandall, a struggling writer whose only real success thus far is writing the novelization of a trashy sci-fi movie (The Crawling Hand, an actual 60’s flick) – this novelization comes to be the book itself. The book is hefty, weighing in at over 700 pages, and readers will find themselves surprised and confused from beginning to end. Personally, I have not read any of Rick Moody’s other work, so I don’t know if this is a deviation from his usual style or how he normally writes, but I imagine this book gained him a fair amount of fans and left some saying “I’ll wait for the next one”.

The book opens with a dedication to Kurt Vonnegut, which would be unimportant if the novel didn’t have as many parallels to Vonnegut’s writing. Moody establishes his main character as well read – referencing many other famous novels indirectly – but Vonnegut’s influence is seen in the fast-paced, crazy plot Moody weaves. (This is not to say a fan of Vonnegut’s will immediately love this book; I enjoy almost all of Vonnegut’s work and “The Four Fingers of Death” fell a little flat for me.) The pacing of the novel is confusing and unclear at times – the tangents Crandall breaks off into are oftentimes not as funny as perhaps Moody intended, and further puzzle the reader. The novel is branded as “comedy”, and while it indeed has some laugh-out-loud lines, on the majority it’s funniest when Moody doesn’t try.

This is not to say the novel doesn’t have redeeming points – it has several. Some of Moody’s lines are comic genius, and the ending (as sprawling as it is) is wonderful. The juxtaposition of what Crandall thinks of as his greatest accomplishment (his six word story: “Go get some eggs, you dwarf”) and the actual novel (far more than six words) is funny in and of itself. When Moody steps back from the comedy and focuses on description, it succeeds beautifully. Once you get past the taxing introduction, the story has a much better flow and will prompt most people to read it straight through. The setting and plot is enough to draw readers in – a futuristic dystopian society, told from a dashing astronaut’s point of view. It has everything! Space! Sex! Battles! Apocalypses!

This novel appears to be marketed as a comic romp, when it lends itself better to a movie trailer. If Moody had taken out about half of the comedy, cut down on the tangents, and tightened up the novel as a whole, it would be a much better success. If he was trying to play on his protagonist’s six word story by having as many words as possible in his own, it didn’t work as well as he’d hoped. There were superfluous tangents and attempted jokes that didn’t need to be there, and the unnecessary complexity ultimately distracted from what could have been a great novel.
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Apr 06, 2011 David Brown rated it 3 of 5 stars

Space the final frontier. Only a select few have the opportunity to grace its presence. These men and women are the bravest of our kind. Willfully giving up everything they know to travel millions of miles from home, if only for the chance to better all of mankind. Sounds great right? These are the aspirations that all the NASA promotional videos are lined with. Rick Moody paints a very different picture. A very satirical picture filled with Mexican wrestlers, loneliness, secrets, fake authors,...more Space the final frontier. Only a select few have the opportunity to grace its presence. These men and women are the bravest of our kind. Willfully giving up everything they know to travel millions of miles from home, if only for the chance to better all of mankind. Sounds great right? These are the aspirations that all the NASA promotional videos are lined with. Rick Moody paints a very different picture. A very satirical picture filled with Mexican wrestlers, loneliness, secrets, fake authors, and violence. Space has many dangers, but none more deadly than the human factor.

Rick Moody’s Four Fingers of death is truthfully three stories in one convenient package. Starting off is the tale of the first man mission to Mar as told from the diary of Col. Jed Richards, the telecommunications officer of the mission. Richard describes in detail the failures of the Mars mission, whose problem began well before the nine astronauts reached the planet’s surface. There is mystery, murder and even manly space love. The Second half is the tale of NASA trying to control the mission’s sole survivor, Col. Richard’s murderous left hand. Besides these the two intergalactic tales, adding pages to the book’s spine, Montese Crandall rants about everything not related to space. Did I forget to mention Crandall? He is the fictitious author of these stories. You see Four Finger of Death is the novelization of the 1963 B- Horror flick “The Crawling Hand” that Crandall won the rights to write here in 2025. Got it? Let’s move on.

Four Fingers is a funny book but also a long book, probably too long for its own good. The length of the book frequently highlights its shortcomings. Often times Moody’s not even trying to be funny, it is the absurdity of the situations that will force a chuckle or laugh from the reader. As good example of this would be the homoerotic encounter Col. Richard and Capt. Rose share on their approach to the Red planet, or Crandall’s obsession with Mexican wrestling. But other times Moody’s tales are excessive. Now some of the inanity is acceptable, after all this is a Book based off a B-Movie. Too much of it becomes annoying and repeatable, with no other reason than to pad this 700 plus page book. Readers that muscle through the shortcomings will find a plethora of characters and situations that test the conventions of the sci-fi genre. Beside that Moody’s style is accessible and diverse. Moody easily shifts between writing short comic outburst of Astronauts living in space, to long descriptive paragraphs about the desolate barren landscape of Mars.

The nature of how Four Finger was written could have made it easy for editing. Moody could have simply removed some of the diary entries of Richards, back stories of some of the NASA employees or one of the many many rants of Montese Crandall to cut down the book’s length. A more concise flow would have made this a more enjoyable read. I applaud Moody/Crandall for their dedication to the B-movie format. But they could have taken heed from a concept we rarely use here in the states “Often times less is more.”
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Sep 24, 2010 Richard rated it 4 of 5 stars

Why did I go out and buy this book after feeling burned by his last couple of books and then reading a bunch of confused sounding, negative reviews for this one? It must've been the plot, which all those negative reviews kept holding up as exhibit A in why this book was an embarrassing disaster. As I was reading the same plot summary in all those negative/huh? reviews, I kept thinking that, actually, this book sounds kind of fun, wonderfully strange, and maybe sort of hilarious. And it was. This...more

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Oct 07, 2011 Charles Cohen rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, modern-lit

How exactly does one subvert or send up or satirize a 1950's B-horror-movie? Definitely not with a 700-hundred-page book-within-a-book structure. Of the three sections, "Book Two" was just awful - bloated, arch, and worst of all, boring. Because it was meant to be some shlocky horror nonsense, I never invested myself in any of the characters. "Book One" was at least somewhat interesting, as far as horror movie origin stories go. I especially liked how Moody used the diary format to add suspense...more

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Apr 28, 2011 Steve rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'm a fan of Rick Moody but even good writers can write too much and The Four Fingers of Death is in dire need of an editor!

The premise within the premise is gold (Mars mission goes haywire, a severed hand makes it back to Earth, proceeds to terrorize Earthlings). But as if this wasn't material enough, Moody adds another layer where we have a writer attempting to novelize this premise within the premise, previously a campy B movie, and this is where the novel--not to mention my train of thought-...more

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Oct 11, 2010 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: nov-dec-2010

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,...more

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Sep 30, 2011 Schnaucl rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, horror, library, read_2011, september, science-fiction

2.5 stars

This book is somewhat difficult to explain.

The premise is that an author in 2027 is hired to write the novelization of a remake of a low budget 1967 horror movie. The introduction and afterward are both written by said author, Montese Crandall. In those sections, he talks about his dying wife (she has a disease that slowly destroys her lungs), the way he primarily earns money (selling baseball cards at a flea market) and his "literary genius." He writes long novels then condenses it do...more 2.5 stars

This book is somewhat difficult to explain.

The premise is that an author in 2027 is hired to write the novelization of a remake of a low budget 1967 horror movie. The introduction and afterward are both written by said author, Montese Crandall. In those sections, he talks about his dying wife (she has a disease that slowly destroys her lungs), the way he primarily earns money (selling baseball cards at a flea market) and his "literary genius." He writes long novels then condenses it down to a single sentence which is then published in a magazine. Given his amazingly purple prose this may be an improvement. He writes in a way that makes it clear he's conscious of the reader, though I can't remember if he addresses the reader directly. It's sufficiently interesting, and at one point, poignant, to look past the purple prose.

Book One is the tale of the doomed Mars mission as written by Crandall. The prose is still purple. Oh, so purple. Lots of psuedointellectual and pseudophilosophical tangents. Run on sentences with an amazing number of clauses and subclauses... but the story has a lot of action and the characters are compelling enough that once again, you can look past the purple prose. It helps that Book One is written in diary form with plenty of natural breaks. It's also from a single POV. If it had ended there (with the afterward) I would have given the book four stars.

In a note in front of Book Two Crandall explains that was all prologue that wasn't actually part of the movie he was hired to adapt. Book Two is the novelization of the horror movie and it's where the book completely falls apart. Not only does the story not make a lot of sense, but the purple prose is in full force. Only this time, there are diary entries or chapters. There's occasionally a double line break between POVs but that's all. There are far too many POV characters (more than 8) but they nearly all have the same voice. That is to say, they all have the same run on sentences with pseudointellectual and psuedophilosophical tangents. The only exception to this is Jean-Paul Koo who has a distinct voice only because his every fourth or fifth word (at least once a clause) is some variation of the word "fuck." I have no problem with swearing. But it should be employed judiciously for emphasis. Koo sounds like a kid who just learned his first bad word and so uses it as much as possible to show how "cool" he is.

(view spoiler)

I really had to force myself to get through Book Two. I'd read 30 - 50 pages a night. It's a long book. I read several other books in their entirety while finishing this one.(less)

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Jan 25, 2012 Fred Hughes rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is one quirky little book.

We start out, in something called the Introduction, following the exploits of Montese Crandall who is what I would call a minimalist author. Montese believes that a 25 to 35 page story can be boiled down to it’s purist essence and you end up with a 5 to 7 word sentence after getting rid of all the fluff. This does however take time so Montese has written a total of 7 stories in 6 years and he is not exactly getting rich from it.

At one of his book readings, they don...more

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Jan 03, 2011 Timothy Faust rated it 4 of 5 stars

EDIT: No, you know what? I was wrong. I woke up this morning thinking about this book and realized I missed the fuckin' point. I hope you'll permit this reexamination, as the faults and failings in my initial approach toward the book are those of a certain self-guardedness and this problem is alone mine, and the reconsideration of this book is important to exactly: me, but in the super-wide-set view of all things I would prefer that my tiny little not-even-a-blip is an accurate tiny little not-e...more EDIT: No, you know what? I was wrong. I woke up this morning thinking about this book and realized I missed the fuckin' point. I hope you'll permit this reexamination, as the faults and failings in my initial approach toward the book are those of a certain self-guardedness and this problem is alone mine, and the reconsideration of this book is important to exactly: me, but in the super-wide-set view of all things I would prefer that my tiny little not-even-a-blip is an accurate tiny little not-even-a-blip; that the things I have said and felt about this book and about not this book are shoulder-to-shoulder with something resembling the truth, and I hope you also have a Happy New Year, and I hope you also read this book.

HERE IS MAYBE SOMETHING A LITTLE BIT MORE ACCURATE:
The Four Fingers of Death is ostensibly a book about: a doomed last-resort attempt by the North American government to reclaim economic superiority over its Indian and Chinese rivals and a rushed trip to Mars and a rapid disintegration of human civility and the question of what it means to be human and one astronaut's quest to come back to Earth to see his daughter and an insidious and lethal virus which threatens to fuck up everyone's shit and a talking chimpanzee and a post-apocalyptic southwestern America and a gradual disintegration of human civility and another take on what it means to be human and and &c and.

The Four Fingers of Death is also a book about: a Montese Crandall whose wife is dying and whose life has been crunched and exhausted and spit out and who falls desperately upon an opportunity to pick up some extra cash by churning out the novelization of a remade cult science fiction movie, the text of which makes up the bulk of the book you the reader hold in your hand(s).

But maybe really--and I am not good at literary theory, and it generally does not appeal to me when I am using it on something I've felt personally invested in reading in the same way that breaking down and applying color theory to the cupcake you've baked for me for my birthday does not appeal to me, so i hope this doesn't ring of it--the real meat of The Four Fingers of Death; the real karate chop of it that leaves you emotional and breathless sitting on a chair looking at your feet is the story which is not written. May I attempt to not spoil the ending, or dampen the emotional "whoah, oh god" of the afterword (it is so good; it is too good; it made me sorry for things i've never done and wistful for people i've never met and the relationships we've never built) when I say that it post-establishes all of the preceding text in the context of a work by Montese Crandall. The excesses of the text and its curious emphases are thus made relevant by the reason of the previously-hyperconcise Crandall's concern for them, and an enthusiastic reader is led to play detective and extrapolate the character of the "fake" author and, maybe, care about him a whole bunch--and this is, I think, the real strength of the story. Not the science fiction behemoth, which is entertaining and fun and features occasional moments of extraordinary "oomph," (c.f. a certain passage about a one-winged whooping crane; a certain passage about stars; a certain passage about a talking chimpanzee; a certain missive from a scientist to his wife; among others) but its luckless slouching fictional author and how much we learn about him without learning about him.

This is probably too verbose but, okay, it's too verbose. Please let the bloat of this little text box substitute for a more eloquent display of my enthusiasm for this book I have just recently misread and, upon finishing the afterword of which, I took a long quiet shower.

ALSO HERE ARE SOME OTHER NOTES THAT ARE EVEN LESS ORGANIZED:
- My original comment of "not enough meat flopping around in too large a space" is still accurate. The last third of the novelization feels kind of preachy--really most of the anything that Morton says--in a sense that I think it's Moody being preachy and not Crandall and that's a damn shame.
- There is an argument that Moody's writing is indulgent. Maybe? I don't care. If the writing is supposed to convey a personal emotion and make me feel something, too, then perhaps indulgence rides shotgun. I am okay with this.

HERE IS WHAT I ORIGINALLY WROTE (IT IS KIND OF FUNNY BUT IT IS MOSTLY INACCURATE)
Long, messy, fun; took a while to get into, but I enjoyed the ride. Not enough meat flopping around in too large a space, sometimes, but occasional moments of sublime brilliance and hard "oomph!" made this a great choice.

... That's what she said.(less)

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Jan 16, 2012 John rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-i-own, science-fiction, dystopian-fiction, horror-fiction

"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 Mar...more "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.

(Reposted from my 2010 Amazon review)(less)

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Mar 02, 2013 Mr. Sidel rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book is a meditation on love, more specifically love vis–à–vis death. I really liked the metatextual postmodern elements. Many of the reviews on good reads lambast the "literary" digressions, but I found many of Moody's digressions humorous because they seemed to satirize postmodern writing. The use of the fictional amateur author within the story, Montese Crandall, justifies this interpretation, I think. Some of these rants were utterly ridiculous, but some rants and almost all of the subp...more

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Dec 16, 2011 Tim Hicks rated it 2 of 5 stars

Almost 3 stars, because the Mars story was somewhat engaging. But the more I think about it the more carelessly written that was too. By the end it was falling apart.

And I am not prepared to call something "lit'rature" when it can be adequately explained as having been fueled by large quantities of drugs.
Coleridge notwithstanding.

I've read this wordy, semi-structured stuff before, and it was better. I'm glad to see I wasn't the only one to think of Kilgore Trout.

But by the end I was speed-rea...more

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Dec 11, 2010 zxvasdf rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

Wow. What can I say?

A novelist who boasts of an ability to distill the entirety of his novels into a sentence of six or seven words who writes an introduction the the size of a novella.

An astronaut on a mission to Mars copes with the disintegrating morale and sanity of fellow crew members by writing blog posts with utter candor and something approaching a sort of naivete.

A Korean scientist who stores his French wife in a refrigerator whose relationship with his son is strained. The son has dre...more

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Sep 10, 2010 Shawn rated it 2 of 5 stars

An interesting premise for a book--the novelization of the schlock sci-fi classic "The Crawling Hand"--but The Four Fingers of Death fails to deliver. For one thing, it's too long. 700 pages of bleak landscapes and characters being afflicted with space madness and whatnot. I'm not sure if the long-winded prose is supposed to be a joke or not. The character writing the novelization (the book is a actually a novel within a novel) comes across a someone who doesn't have much talent, so I'm not sure...more

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Nov 04, 2012 Patrick rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: scifi_fantasy

Overall this is a very dark, and quite depressing book. I guess if you find black humour appealing it could be up your alley, but even so I think it's overlong and a bit of a slog. (It's 600+ pages and structured as 3 related but semi-independent narratives, I made it thru the first 2 then decided I'd had enough).

In terms of his near-future Dystopia Moody seems to have drawn together every strand of criticism of modern corporate consumer culture and U.S. fear of decline and mashed them all toget...more

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Mar 14, 2011 Alan rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Those difficult to squick and fond of page-long paragraphs

Recommended to Alan by: Elizabeth Hand in F&SF

You are not prepared for this book. With its multilayered structure, page-long paragraphs and fevered prose, Rick Moody seems to be channeling the late David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe and Philip K. Dick, all at the same time. The result is a disquieting novel-within-a-novel that goes there... unafraid to trawl the depths of lunacy and depravity, at least on the printed page. If there isn't at least one scene in The Four Fingers of Death that gets your back up, that's more than a little bit hard...more

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Aug 19, 2010 Jeremy rated it 1 of 5 stars

I finished Rick Moody's "The Four Fingers of Death" last night, and thank God, because I'm not sure I've ever been so impatient with a book. Look, I love long books. I generally prefer to read long books. I read quickly, and I love to read, so the more time I get to spend with a book, the better. And the description of this book is totally up my alley - a postmodern literary sci-fi novelization of a schlocky monster movie from the 50s? YES PLEASE. And yet it was beyond tedious. He does this thin...more

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Dec 30, 2010 Amber Haschenburger rated it 4 of 5 stars

A Dickensian tale for the modern day, the narrative drift of this novel runs back and forth from relevant to absurd in the quickest of increments while maintaining equal devotion to both sides of the equation. For example an early section devotes nearly two pages to the impingement of age and increasing girth on the narrator's person, from the outside surely an excessive use of verbiage, but the section retains a playfulness that results in a riff that is anything but monotonous. In fact, it inc...more

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Aug 18, 2010 Evan rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 wartim...more

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Aug 21, 2011 Bob rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-club

This book is divided into 4 parts. The first part is a fake forward from the author and I found it super boring. The next part is super awesome. Next comes a fake interlude by the author which is equally boring. Then comes a book adapted from a screenplay (?) which was really bad. The premise is that the story is really bad, but I don't know why the author forced me to actually read it. Actually, he did not, book club did. And it didn't really force that hard, I skimmed most of it.

The whole book...more

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Sep 10, 2010 Julian rated it 2 of 5 stars

Over-indulged and over-written, not as funny as it wants to be, nor as profound as it strives to be. Which is too bad, because nobody writes a book this looooong unless it's in earnest, and Rick Moody, if nothing else, clearly earnestly means it.

Was it that no editors were available, or did Moody make a deal with somebody that precluded the ignominy of being edited? By the time something like the 5th character is shocked (shocked, I tell you) to discover that the (not mad enough) scientist is k...more

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Feb 13, 2011 Brian Meehan rated it 3 of 5 stars

A schizophrenic account of one man's journey to Mars and back. I really enjoyed the space travel portion of the book, as there were several interesting conflicts between astronauts and a thought-provoking account of the psychological dangers of spending significant amounts of time away from earth. But then the author transitions into stories about a severed arm that roams the countryside murdering people, a chimpanzee that gains the ability to speak and pontificates on animal rights issues, and...more

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Jun 04, 2012 Terry rated it 5 of 5 stars

The dust jacket says "A rollicking romp through deep space and Arizona." For me, it only takes a few pages to know if a book is good. This one is. It moves at breakneck speed with impeccable timing, reminiscent of Dave Eggers's seminal "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" with a liberal shot of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Dark and absolutely hilarious. I want to gulp it down like a Big Mac but it deserves to be savoured like slow food.

(after finishing)OK, so the first part was dar...more

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About Rick Moody

Rick Moody (born Hiram Frederick Moody, III on October 18, 1961, New York City), is an American novelist and short story writer best known for The Ice Storm (1994), a chronicle of the dissolution of two suburban Connecticut families over Thanksgiving weekend in 1973, which brought widespread acclaim, and became a bestseller; it was later made into a feature film.

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“People came to the desert because the stars were in the desert, and the stars had yet to be corrupted by man [...]. The stars, it seemed, would crush man in a scenic, gravitational panorama before man would ever corrupt the stars.” — 1 person liked it

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