The Four Fingers of Death

Weird but good. It was like a sci-fi “Infinite Jest” in some ways.

An interesting premise for a book–the novelization of the schlock sci-fi classic “The Crawling Hand”–but The Four Fingers of Death fails to deliver. For one thing, it's too long. 700 pages of bleak landscapes and characters being afflicted with space madness and whatnot. I'm not sure if the long-winded prose is supposed to be a joke or not. The character writing the novelization (the book is a actually a novel within a novel) comes across a someone who doesn't have much talent, so I'm not sure if the bland quality of his novelization is an intentional act by Rick Moody, or if it's just the way Rick Moody writes. The novel could have been greatly improved if Moody had adopted another aspect of classic genre cinema: the serial. I could definitely see this novel working as a collection of connected short stories or a series of novellas. As a giant novel, however, it leaves much to be desired.