The Four Fingers of Death
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summary
Montese Crandall's rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. But then he swindles a job and begins to write a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, "The Crawling Hand." Crandall tells the story of the United States launching its first doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars, with three space pods carrying nine Americans for three years. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is discovered, chaos and mayhem ensue. Only a disembodied human arm with four fingers (why isn't it missing its middle finger?) returns to Earth, and it might be an instrument of reanimation or an infectious killing machine. Set in a dystopian America, The Four Fingers of Death is a brilliantly inventive novel that explores themes of civilization, culture, and the human condition. Moody's book will captivate readers seeking a science fiction with a sense of humor, as it delivers a laugh-out-loud and sometimes absurdly funny psychological thriller. This novel will particularly appeal to admirers of classic comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49 and Catch-22.