The book became a bit of a love letter to Tucson and to that part of the desert.įour Fingers seems to take a much lighter and perhaps more forgiving view of the world than does some of your earlier work, such as The Ice Storm. I was kind of doing this already, my parents live in Arizona, but upon spending my first day in Tucson, I fell in love with the place and the people. For the second half, I did indeed spend a lot of time in the Sonoran Desert.
Some of this was reading other fiction writers on the subject, like Kim Stanley Robinson's monumental Mars trilogy, and lots of it was reading nonfiction on rockets and space travel. I did lots and lots of research on rocketry and Martian topography. It was even worse than I remembered! I decided it would be fun to rewrite the story.Īpart from watching old Alan Hale movies, what sort of research went into the book? Given your close descriptions, we can imagine your crawling around in a sun-blasted desert searching for just the right detail. And I remembered watching it as a kid, among the many, many, many horror films I watched then. But I stumbled on a Rhino Video edition of The Crawling Hand (1963). I am not in the habit of visiting Wal-Mart, and I don’t ordinarily find stuff I want to watch in the discount bin. This is a singular event for a number of reasons. One day, after I finished The Diviners, I was rooting around in ones of those bins of videos at Wal-Mart where everything costs $3.99. How did the idea for Four Fingers come to you? We’ll start by taking Montese Crandall’s bait at the very beginning of the novel, when he twits readers for wanting to know where his ideas come from. From the dark days of the Great Recession.”
“It’ll be more contemporary, more political, less hyperbolic, more controlled,” he says. Moody tells Kirkus that, having steered into comic and sci-fi territory with Four Fingers, he’s now at work on a much different kind of novel. What happens next is…well, you’ll need to read the twisty-turny story for yourself to follow all the strange courses it takes. The four fingers in question refer to an old grade-Z creature feature from 1963-but more, to a very real partial hand that is now creating mayhem back on Earth, having gone awry somewhere on the path home from Mars. Rick Moody surprised us this year with The Four Fingers of Death, a sprawling, madcap novel that wanders through deep space into the heart of the Arizona desert, its hero a lost-soul writer named Montese Crandall who spends his days trying to reduce novels to the size of Internet tweets.
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