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, launching at last its doomed manned
mission to the desolation of 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 vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The arm may
hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing
machine. In the ensuing days, it crawls through the heartbroken
wasteland of a civilization at its breaking point, economically and
culturally--a dystopia of lowlife, emigration from America, and
laughable lifestyle alternatives.
The Four Fingers of Death is a stunningly inventive, sometimes
hilarious, monumental novel. It will delight admirers of comic
masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and
Catch-22.
