The Four Fingers of Death is a stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel. 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 arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. 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. Still, this is an amusing, vibrant narrative.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. And the afterword, in which Moody inserts himself into the text to track down the "fragmentary" Morse, could've been removed. However, the wryly perceptive passages about the hospitality industry, which include a hatchet job on bed-and-breakfast inns, occasionally give way to slightly mawkish outpourings. In his delightful archness and strategic reticence, Morse is reminiscent of the epicurean narrator of John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure. The online reviews look back over a period of roughly 40 years, from Morse's childhood stay at the Plaza Hotel in 1971 to a visit to a bedbug-infested Bronx motel in 2014. The novel consists primarily of an idiosyncratic collection of hotel reviews written by Reginald Edward Morse, a sporadically employed motivational speaker leading a life of "nomadic compulsion." A hotel site's top reviewer, whose real-life identity is a mystery, Morse mixes in autobiographical accounts of his own professional, familial, and romantic failures amid disquisitions on the "diversity of key and lock design" and hotel pornography ("at the heart of travel in America"). Moody's (The Four Fingers of Death) clever latest explores the narrative possibilities of online reviews, that form of democratic criticism crucial to the success of everything from toaster ovens to literature itself.
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