The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel - Couverture rigide

Moody, Rick

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0316118915 ISBN 13 : 9780316118910

Editeur : Little, Brown and Company, 2010

Synopsis

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

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

"A rollicking romp... improbable and thoroughly entertaining, courtesy of master storyteller Moody...Brings in dozens of characters...and not a one of them wasted; as he gamely intertwines their destinies, he switches mood, voice register and generally has a grand old time twitting the conventions of science fiction and literary narrative alike...A smart, fun satire--Jonathan Swift in space, with twists befitting Vincent Price." (Kirkus)

"Rick Moody's latest novel is a riotous gloss on an already forgotten flourish of presidential theatre: George W. Bush's 2004 announcement that the United States would send a manned mission to Mars...Moody imagines a 2025 NASA expedition to the Red Planet and conjures a not-so-distant future that is less a forecast of the world we are soon to inhabit than a fantasia drawn from early-century jitters about national demise....Moody's comic tour de force encompasses scavenger survivalists, careerists NASA functionaries, a weak and peripatetic president, and a DeLillo-esque mass spiritual movement called the omnium gatherum, whose desert conclave supplies the backdrop for the denouement....Animated by Moody's inventive energies and dark wit, the novel is neither gloomy nor grim, preoccupied though it is with infection, contagion, and death....Like any American writer worth his salt, Moody traffics in ambiguous symbols, and the diseased arm possesses the fraught doubleness of an emblem out of Hawthorne, a writer at the center of his 2002 memoir, The Black Veil....Conceptual wizardry and resonance are not reconciled with ease, nor do many writers attempt such a rapprochement, so it is here, in the intersection of narrative excess and genuine feeling, that Moody is at his most daring and arresting." (BookForum James Gibbons)

"Wacky, wonderful imaginings." (More Magazine)

"Like Vonnegut, Moody packs his novel with weird New Age pseudo-cults, odd philosophies, bizarre science experiments and one-off characters who chatter at you for a dozen pages before getting strangled by a severed arm with four fingers." (i09.com Charlie Jane Anders)

"Combines Kurt Vonnegut's masterly black humor with the apocalyptic scenery of B-movies and the postmodern playfulness of Neal Stephenson." (Library Journal Henry L. Carrigan)

"In The Four Fingers of Death, Rick Moody's rollicking shaggy-dog novel (a mixed breed of science fiction and satire), a sorry writer bangs out the novelization of a campy 60s horror film, while a severed human arm, the sole survivor of an ill-starred mission to Mars, creeps across the desert." (Vanity Fair Elissa Schappell)

"700-plus pages of wacky, wonderful imaginings: there's a rare collection of baseball cards, three space pods inhabited by nine American astronauts and a lonely human arm which crawls through civilization." (More )

"This is Moody uncorked, slyly going back to the wordy, toothsome, 19th century novel, with a science-fiction twist." (Los Angeles Times Salter Reynolds)

"For readers who enjoy rambling, picaresque adventures with a satiric edge (think: Thomas Pynchon), it's...a blast." (Richmond Times-Dispatch Doug Childers)

"Set in an America even bleaker than the '70s of The Ice Storm Moody's latest is a comic sci-fi epic....His tale is filled with digressions that reveal a sad future we may soon inherit." (San Antonio Express-News)

Présentation de l'éditeur :

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.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Little, Brown and Company
• Date d'édition: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0316118915
• ISBN 13: 9780316118910
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 736