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A review by dontpanic42
The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody
3.0
I think I echo the reviews of many other people when I say that the structure of this novel leaves something to be desired. The basic overall concept is that in the year 2025, a wannabe writer gets the opportunity to make money writing the novelization of an old B-movie, The Crawling Hand, about a mission to the moon from which the only returning memento is the infected hand of an astronaut that lands on the San Diego beach and proceeds to go on a killing spree and to infect a local teenager with its madness. The majority of the book, then, is the reworked movie plot, this time with the mission being to Mars and the infected hand ending up in the deserts near Tucson, Arizona (redubbed Rio Blanco). To his credit, Moody even manages to clean up the plot line to make it a believable story (at least, as much so as any such story is going to be).
As a novelization of a wonderfully awful old sci-fi/horror flick, the pieces of the novel that constitute Book 1 and Book 2 are great (overall, Book 2 works much better and is more engaging in its storytelling, but the background story presented in Book 1 is tolerably good if a bit too interested in going on tangents). But the hundred or so pages of the novel as a whole that focus in on the fictional author of the novelization of the movie presented in Books 1 and 2 should have been left on the cutting room floor. His story of himself is beyond uninteresting; it is distracting from the rest of the book, which is full of great characters, interesting musings on a huge variety of subjects, and an engaging plot. Before Book 2, there is a footnote from the fictional author describing how one could have read the book out of order, and looking back, I wish I had read that footnote, because though the offer is obviously not meant to be taken so seriously, I do think I would enjoyed my experience more had I just read Books 1 and 2 (or heck, maybe just Book 2).
As an aside, I recommend that anyone interested go find the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where they watch The Crawling Hand.
As a novelization of a wonderfully awful old sci-fi/horror flick, the pieces of the novel that constitute Book 1 and Book 2 are great (overall, Book 2 works much better and is more engaging in its storytelling, but the background story presented in Book 1 is tolerably good if a bit too interested in going on tangents). But the hundred or so pages of the novel as a whole that focus in on the fictional author of the novelization of the movie presented in Books 1 and 2 should have been left on the cutting room floor. His story of himself is beyond uninteresting; it is distracting from the rest of the book, which is full of great characters, interesting musings on a huge variety of subjects, and an engaging plot. Before Book 2, there is a footnote from the fictional author describing how one could have read the book out of order, and looking back, I wish I had read that footnote, because though the offer is obviously not meant to be taken so seriously, I do think I would enjoyed my experience more had I just read Books 1 and 2 (or heck, maybe just Book 2).
As an aside, I recommend that anyone interested go find the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode where they watch The Crawling Hand.