Rick Moody's THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH

What happens when a writer with exceedingly literary pretentions wrangles a contract to novelize a B-movie of the kind most of us nowadays can only imagine watching with the silhouettes of a nebbishy guy and two iconic robots bopping around in the lower right corner of the screen?

Has anyone ever asked this question before?

Well, Rick Moody did. And the results are bananas.

The Four Fingers of Death, for much of its considerable length, directly answers this question by serving us a smorgasbord of pulpy goodness ranging from a crewed mission to Mars (conceived as the last grasp at relevance for a NASA and a United States on the brink of destitution, third world-caliber exploitation by actual world powers, and a concomitant brain drain that has brought us into the world of Mike Judge's Idiocracy but without that film's unfortunate eugenics arguments) to a suddenly self-aware chimpanzee whose pages-long speeches display a surfeit of internet-gleaned erudition*, to an amputated human arm infected with alien bacteria that's mindlessly crawling around Arizona committing murder and a few sex crimes while spreading its disease. Helpful servant Thing, of Addams Family fame, this ain't. 

Oddly, the narrative doesn't really play this for laughs, though it acknowledges on nearly every page that its every premise is ridiculous. I mentioned that the fictional writer of this madness, whose own career forms a frame narrative for his novelization of The Four Fingers of Death (a 1960s Technicolor remake, we learn, of an older black and white schlock-classic, The Crawling Hand), has serious literary pretensions; our man Montese Crandall, previously only known for flash fiction so brief that he only ever actually published single sentences, explores in depth and with sensitivity the inner lives of the astronauts on their journey to and through their tragic, pathetic and farcical experiences as the first humans on Mars, the dawning sentience of the experimental chimpanzee, Morton (alas, unable to perform a Caesar and uplift other apes with whom to be strong together), and the plights of the many earthbound humans, at many strata of society, whose lives are affected by the titular hand and its disease. 

While also treating us to some over-the-top gross and bawdy sex scenes, very much the funniest I've ever read.

Meanwhile, Moody pulls a kind of The Corrida at San Feliu of a trick, considering and expressing considerable emotion upon different aspects of a common problem -- most prominently, how gifted but emotionally stunted men deal with the loss, to death or desertion, of their wives -- through different narrative layers. In the frame narrative, Crandall is watching his wife slowly waste away and die of chronic disease; in the astronaut layer, Major Jed Richards is kind of in denial of the fact that his long separation from his wife started long before he blasted off for Mars and he's probably not getting her back if he makes it back to earth; and in the chaotic Crawling Hand account, a scientist whose wife died some time ago is keeping her body in cryonic suspension while he experiments on lab animals using cells from her body as he works on a cure for what killed her -- and hasn't leveled with his teenaged son about any of it. The son, meanwhile, often looks poised to repeat his father's emotional mistakes, except he has a girlfriend who is way more healthy and dedicated to making their relationship work than any of the wives in the novel. Seriously, if you don't come out of this with a deep love for Vienna Roberts, I am starting to doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

That this book doesn't collapse under the weight of all of these premises is a source of wonder to me, even weeks after having compulsively read its over 700 pages almost without stopping (after a false start with the audio book, which is so poorly done in so many ways that I didn't even make it halfway through before my spleen erupted and sprayed bile all over a bunch of my Discord buddies, who I think were ready to beg me to switch to any other format when I did just that). Even if I hadn't been deeply emotionally invested in all of these characters and strapped in for all of their plots and subplots, I would have hung in just to see how the hell Moody was going to bring all of this madness to a close, even before I realized he was going to do so in the middle of a howling mad latter day Burning Man analog. But damn me if he didn't stick the landing. And earn a perfect 11 from all of the judges except for that one who actually is just really afraid of apes.

Utterly batshit. And brilliant. 

*Obviously this book was written back in the days when web searches were still useful and AI slop not even imagined by the likes of your Corys Doctorow or your Williams Gibson. Ever the peril of science fiction is this race against actual culture towards dystopiae.