It will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22. 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. 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.
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