A review by gobblebook
The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody

3.0

In the frame story of this book, an author in the not-too-distant-future with an ailing wife gets a job writing the novelization of the 1950's b-horror movie, "The Crawling Arm." The book starts with the frame story, the author explaining what was going on in his life when he started to write the book. Then we read his work. The first half of the book is the back-story that wasn't in the movie: the story of the first manned mission to Mars. Things go very badly for the astronauts, and they get infected with a gruesome bacterium that causes their bodies to fall apart, makes them want to murder those around them, and animates their dead flesh. The second half of the book is very loosely related to the movie: upon return to earth, the lander from Mars blows up in the atmosphere, and among the debris from the crash is the severed arm of the last remaining astronaut. The arm can move independently, and has a series of sexual and murderous adventures, infecting people with the disease along the way. The novelization has very little to do with the movie: the crawling arm and its infectiousness are just about the only recognizable features from the movie. I loved the first half of the book, describing the Mars mission. This part was suspenseful and engaging. Moody can be very long-winded, and often goes off on ridiculous tangents, and in the first half of the book I found this to be enjoyable. The macabre humor, the tangents, the odd situations, the play with language, were all lots of fun. The second half of the book was much less engaging. There was a lot that I liked, such as the depiction of the near future, ravaged by climate change, economic problems, and lack of oil. But somehow the second half was unsatisfyingly rambling, and I just couldn't care about any of the characters or the fate of the arm. This book is ultimately about illness: everyone in the book is sick in some way or another, physically or mentally or both, and the illnesses are all slow and debilitating. But I'm not sure that the book actually says anything insightful about illness, it just dwells on it. Which is pretty much how I feel about the whole book: parts of it were lots of fun, but a lot of it was just rambling, and at the end, I'm not really sure what the point of it was. I listened to the audiobook, which made the book more frustrating because I couldn't skim when it got tedious. The narrator was great overall, and had just the right kind of snarky inflection for the book. Unfortunately, he mispronounced a lot of words. Granted, Moody uses a lot of big words, but I was shocked at some of the words that the narrator mispronounced ("Reading, England" and "eschatology" were particularly memorable, but there were dozens of others).