The Four Fingers of Death: A Novel
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- ISBN13: 9780316118910
- Condition: New
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Montese Crandall is a exploited 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 re-establish 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 planet, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an communicable 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.
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“The Four Fingers of Death”, Rick Temperamental’s latest novel, is not just the best novel from the greatest living writer of my generation. It is a superb work of science fiction in its own right; a most elegant blend of interplanetary space opera and horror, set amidst a near future dystopian southwestern United States that bears more than a passing glimpse to our own. Dedicated to the memory of Kurt Vonnegut, the novel really reads more like a literary tribute to the legendary Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” with more than a passing nod to Neal Stephenson’s late work (“Cryptonomicon”, “The Baroque Cycle”). With “The Four Fingers of Death”, Rick Temperamental joins such eminent mainstream writers as Margaret Atwood and Doris Lessing in demonstrating that he, like them, has become well-versed in the literary traditions of science fiction.
“The Four Fingers of Death” is a literary triptych; three separate novels all merged into one. First is the near future tale that opens and closes this novel of hard on his luck writer Montese Crandall, who wins the right to write a novelization of the 2025 re-establish of the classic 1963 horror film “The Crawling Hand”. The additional two books comprise his “novelization”. The first book, chronicling the interplanetary trek to Mars and the subsequent exploration of the Red Planet by a doomed team of American astronauts, is Temperamental at his Bradburyesque best. Temperamental’s evocation of interplanetary space travel is one of the finest accounts I’ve seen written in science fiction, rendered in a cinema verite-like style. The second book is an exhilarating, regularly darkly humorous, descent into horror, as we, the readers, are immersed in the trail of death and destruction left by the “Four Fingers of Death”, set largely within the Rio Blanco (really Tucson), Arizona cityscape. It’s also a smart, regularly witty, and dystopic, look at our own immediate future (maybe the present), with Temperamental’s literary commentary ranging from alternative lifestyles to the philosophical observations of human-animal relations from the very mouth of a talking chimpanzee.
I establish “The Four Fingers of Death” impossible to place down. This is a fantastic work of literary fiction which deserves a wide readership from both mainstream and traditional science fiction literary audiences. If nothing else, “The Four Fingers of Death” should remind readers that there exists now – as well as in the past – a fantastic treasure trove of literary riches awaiting anyone who is unfamiliar with the history and literary traditions of science fiction. Certainly one of the finest works of fiction published this year and a work which demonstrates finally, at last, that Rick Temperamental was not merely a student of John Hawkes, but also of Angela Carter, at Brown University.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
Rick Temperamental has, once again, forged new terrain. Out of really brilliant ancient terrain! His latest novel is readable and amusing and sad and, as permanently, very smart. I’m not even a fan of campy horror movies, or Mars, or space travel, or talking chimpanzees. . . but I loved this book. Do yourself a favor: read it.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5