Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave i...
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Jan 25, 2012
Jimmy
rated it: 
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. A
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Feb 17, 2011
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
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Nov 15, 2011
Christine
rated it: 
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 Crandal More...
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 Crandal More...
Aug 24, 2011
SandHouse
rated it: 
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
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Apr 13, 2011
Artie
rated it: 
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers.
To view it, click here
Apr 06, 2011
Katie
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“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. T More...
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. T More...
Apr 06, 2011
David
rated it:
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 aut
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Feb 05, 2011
Paul
rated it:
I can't remember where I read about Rick Moody's book, but I think it was in our Tucson Weekly alternative newspaper, where he was billed as a worthy successor to Kurt Vonnegut. Now that I've waded through Moody's not-very-Vonnegutish novel, I think the review gave it raves because much of the action -- when it is not set on Mars -- is set in a thinly-disguised Tucson. One of Kurt Vonnegut's fictional characters was the sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout. Rick Moody's Kilgore Trout is Montese Crandal
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Sep 24, 2010
Richard
rated it:
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.
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Oct 07, 2011
Charles
rated it:
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 for
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Apr 28, 2011
Steve
rated it:
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 o More...
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 o More...
Oct 11, 2010
Bookmarks Magazine
rated it:
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 re
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Sep 30, 2011
Schnaucl
rated it:
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 More...
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 More...
Jan 25, 2012
Fred
rated it:
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 More...
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 More...
Jan 03, 2011
Timothy
rated it:
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
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Jan 16, 2012
John
rated it:
"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'
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Dec 16, 2011
Tim
rated it:
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 T More...
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 T More...
Dec 11, 2010
zxvasdf
rated it:
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 so More...
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 so More...
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Sep 10, 2010
Shawn
rated it:
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
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Mar 14, 2011
Alan
rated it:
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
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Aug 19, 2010
Jeremy
rated it: 
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.
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Dec 30, 2010
Amber
rated it:
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
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Aug 18, 2010
Evan
rated it:
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 d More...
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 d More...
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Aug 21, 2011
Bob
rated it:
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.
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Sep 10, 2010
Julian
rated it:
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) sc More...
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) sc More...
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Feb 13, 2011
Brian
rated it:
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, an
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Aug 23, 2011
Mike
rated it:
Moody dedicates this novel to Kurt Vonnegut. I can see why;THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH would have been in Ol'"So it goes" wheelhouse. Along with Pynchon, Heller, and Robbins. It is 700+ pages of Weirdness and wordiness. But oh, the places it takes you. A second-class, down on it's luck U.S., an ficitious & ill-fated manned mission to Mars, and a Burning Man convocation on steriods. Plus a talking chimpanzee and the star of the show.....a zombie severed arm on a killing spree. Chock full
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Mar 07, 2011
Jason
rated it:
From the crazy movie it's based on to the amazing space scenes, this book took me to all sorts of places I never knew I wanted to go but I loved every pulpy minute of the strange trip.
QUOTE: "Upon the advent of the digital age, as you know, writers who went on and on and on just didn't last. You couldn't read all that nonsense on a screen. Fragmentation became the one true way. Fragmentation offered a point-and-click interface. Additionally, this strategic reduction blurred the More...
QUOTE: "Upon the advent of the digital age, as you know, writers who went on and on and on just didn't last. You couldn't read all that nonsense on a screen. Fragmentation became the one true way. Fragmentation offered a point-and-click interface. Additionally, this strategic reduction blurred the More...
Jan 26, 2012
Cynthia
rated it:
Alright, so I've been slowly working my way through this novel....extremely slowly. I honestly did not know what to expect from this novel nor was I really looking for anything in particular. In saying that, I did not finish the work. Therefore my review may not be altogether satisfying or warranted.
Again, all I know is how far I've read into this novel. In saying that, I only made in about a quarter of the way through. I stopped approx 50 pages after jizz was floating in the air of More...
Again, all I know is how far I've read into this novel. In saying that, I only made in about a quarter of the way through. I stopped approx 50 pages after jizz was floating in the air of More...
Apr 24, 2011
Jon
rated it:
I really wanted to like Four Fingers of Death a lot more than I did. There were stretches of the book that I found myself really enjoying (book one, surprisingly - the most straightforward of the sections), but most of the book had me pressing forward, reading at the edge of the speed at which I can comprehend.
I'm actually a big fan of well-executed wordiness. My problem with this book comes in the way the wordiness is carried out. While Pynchon or DeLillo might exhaustively describe More...
I'm actually a big fan of well-executed wordiness. My problem with this book comes in the way the wordiness is carried out. While Pynchon or DeLillo might exhaustively describe More...
