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.

Chris F. Holm's CHILD ZERO

Dirty faces peered at Jake and Amy around flimsy doors and dangling tent flaps as they passed. Some looked stricken. Others, suspicious. One woman appeared to Jake as if she were wearing war paint until he realized the lines of white from cheek to jaw were made by falling tears.

William Gibson has contributed a lot to contemporary discourse over the years -- he coined the term "cyberspace" for one -- but the term that serves as our most valuable rhetorical currency these days is The Jackpot, or The Jackpot Years, his vividly descriptive term for humanity's collective experience of multiple existential threats simultaneously, like when a slot machine's wheels (or, nowadays, algorithm- driven simulation of wheels) all come up with the display for the really big prize and an avalanche of coins pours out of the bottom. I guess that's probably virtual now, too? I've never gotten the appeal of gambling so I might be way out of date.

Gibson, anyway, used it as a slang term in dialogue, what characters say to each other as shorthand for a period in their past that Gibson wasn't interested in actually depicting for us. 

In Child Zero, Chris "The Collector" Holm has depicted a version of The Jackpot Years for us, one skewed toward biomedical catastrophe but hey, we still know that things like antibiotic resistance and whatnot are not unrelated to threats that aren't directly biomedical, like anthropogenic climate change and peak oil and good old fashioned pollution. 

In the world of Child Zero, the relationship between drug-resistant disease organisms and climate change gets a direct link in the form of a bacteriophage (basically a virus that attacks bacteria, but also tends to transfer genetic material from other bacteria to its targets, occasionally allowing the rapid spread of, say, a mutation that has allowed one bacterial cell to survive a medical treatment) that was dormant in Siberian permafrost until -- doh! -- we took the "perma" out of the frost and let the phage go on a global gene-swapping spree. This means that suddenly long-ago-defeated diseases like gonorrhea are back with a vengeance, and even a papercut can turn into a septic mess that ends in amputation. We're not quite in the world of The Sheep Look Up, here, but we're definitely Sheep-adjacent. Just, imagine if Austin Train was Elon Musk, greedy egotistical billionaire-on-paper, instead of the gentle scholar who wilfully went into obscurity. 

Also there's a bit of Children of Men mixed in here for good measure, the film more than the novel. In that there is a MacGuffin that is also a person.

Anyway. Making matters much worse for everybody was a bioterror attack in which a madman rigged two major New York City subway stations homemade aerosol devices loaded with the bacteria that causes bubonic, septicemic and pneumonic plague, Aum Shinrikyu style, infecting hundreds with the deadly disease and sending New York into lockdown. The scene described in the pulled quote above takes place in Central Park's Sheep Meadow, renamed "Park City" after it has become a semi-permanent field hospital-cum-internment camp, originally set up as temporary shelter for people who found themselves stranded in NYC without places to sleep, now a grim third world shantytown.

The aformentioned Jake is one of our point of view characters, an NYPD detective whose wife died of the plague and whose daughter, Zoe, is gravely ill and in danger of being swept up by the United States Department of Biological Security, a new bureaucracy straight out of conspiracist fever dreams that purportedly monitors even the most seemingly private communications for any hint of "unreported" illness. Since the death of his wife, Jake has had and broken up with an amazing girlfriend, whom he dumped because she wouldn't succumb to his emotional blackmail and chuck her career as a brilliant surgeon "for the little girl's sake" so he's not the greatest guy ever, but who is in this dirty old world these days (ours or the novel's)? Anyway, lickety split, he and his amazing partner Ameera (aka Amy, the same Amy mentioned in the pulled quote) quickly catch a big bloody massacre of a case and Jake has no choice but to call his ex, Hannah, who's just had the Worst Day Ever at her job trying to Save Lives and Do Surgery without antibiotics, to come babysit and maybe keep Zoe from dying? Pretty please?

For what it's worth, Jake knows he's the asshole here.

While Hannah takes on the task of trying to save Zoe, Jake and Amy have to go to the Sheep Meadow where a massacre has taken place! Over 100 people have been murdered and their bodies burnt, not so much to prevent their being identified because Who Cares but to conceal the fact that all of them were in perfect health. Before long we get a hazy idea of how this came to be -- a hundred internees in a camp full of incurable infection and disease and not so much as a head cold -- and that it relates to a 12 year old El Salvadoran immigrant named Mateo, our human MacGuffin.

From here on out it becomes mostly an escort mission, with Jake's progress hijacked by the need to keep this invaluable kid from falling into the wrong hands; he, Amy, Hannah and by extension Zoe, are now responsible for the safety of the Most Important Person in the World and need to get him to the Good Guys Who Can Help while keeping him safe from, well, everybody else in New York City. This could get hackneyed as hell but Chris Holm is no hack; there are surprises and twists around every corner and everything is expertly handled except...

Well, there's this one thing. Probably just for texture, episodes of the story are intercut with news clippings giving us glimpses of the story of a small band of Above the Law-type desperados who have decided to outfit a fishing boat for deep sea travel (badly) and attempt to sail from Australia to New Zealand to demand "biological asylum." It's a premise that would make a fine whole 'nother novel but its presence in Child Zero didn't quite work for me, because it has nothing to do with Child Zero's story. I kept expecting it to tie in to the larger narrative somehow but nope, it's just there for color. This may irritate other readers less than it did me, but I think most of my readers (who have made my still-incomplete Suns Suns Suns series the most read pages on this blog by a very significant margin; i.e., Gene Wolfe fans or wannabe fans or almost-fans) are the sort who will be annoyed by this at least as much as I, if not more so.

But really, just as Jake's mistake with Hannah makes him as a character and their relationship as it evolves much more interesting, this flaw in Child Zero must stand as a minor one. After all, it does point to the larger world and the plight of everybody else who isn't a New Yorker. And that's not nothing.

Jeff Vandermeer's HUMMINGBIRD SALAMANDER

What if William Gibson wrote a fourth book in the Bigend trilogy, but left out Bigend and just focused on its weird questing structure through a world that's 20 minutes into the future while also making it a little bit of a Jackpot story? What if Cormac McCarthy wrote The Road, but started the story a little while before the hopeless devastation? What if Margaret Atwood wrote a fourth Maddaddam book but used an actually tough woman with actual agency as her heroine?

What if Jeff Vandermeer wrote a novel recognizably set in our world?

Ladies, Gentlemen and Enbies, Hummingbird Salamander.

Herein we meet a character we will only know as Jane, a high level security consultant with a messed-up past in the form of an abusive grandfather, a gently but sadly mentally ill mother, a barely-there nothing of a father, and a devastatingly handsome older brother who gets away with too much mischief for his own good. Jane was the baby of the family, but quickly grew into its mountain, a huge and powerfully strong, physically imposing woman who had a brief wrestling career before drifting into security -- growing up with the family she did meant she had all the requisite skills for that, including talent with firearms and the fearlessness needed to use it.

As we meet her, she's at the top of her game, able to pick her own assignments, seemingly happily married to a man who seems physically to be her exact counterpart, raising a teenaged daughter and losing touch with her in that sad and wistful way that mothers and teenage daughters almost always lose touch... and then one day a barista at her habitual coffee shop hands her a mysterious note from a mysterious (and recently deceased) woman she's never heard of, that gives her directions to begin a mysterious quest that will send her careening all over California (with a brief side trip to New York), break her family to pieces, put her in the line of fire of every kind of firearm known to man, bury her briefly in a pile of taxidermied animals (what is it with this year and people hiding inside piles of dead animals in literature? Stephen Graham-Jones had one of his heroines doing it, too), almost burn her alive and basically live the nightmare life of the unwilling participant in an espionage thriller, all while uncovering a plot to maybe save earth's dwindling natural ecosystems as the human world that's all but destroyed them starts collapsing.

But never once does Jane despair or feel sorry for herself. This lady is tough, smart and competent as hell. It's actually a pleasure seeing her get herself out of impossible situations even as we share her self-disgust at falling for ruses or incorrectly interpreting the very cryptic (we're talking digits written on the insides of the glass eyes from a taxidermy animal levels of cryptic) clues or not noticing secret doors the first time around.

And yet somehow all of this ends on kind of a hopeful note, even as Jane lays down, possibly to die, after watching everything she loved or even sort of cared about crash and burn around her; what she has learned about the mysterious woman who arranged for her to get that fateful note, that woman's relationship to her own family and wreck of a childhood, and the titanic and mad project the woman had concocted to give Nature a second chance has let her hope, and that lets us hope, too.

But, of course, there isn't a real life counterpart of that mysterious woman; we've had too many examples of what actual people who control the kind of resources this one did in Hummingbird Salamander actually choose to do with them, and it's not great. But maybe, just maybe, one of them will stumble across this book and get a better idea? Or something?