Forthcoming: The Four Fingers of Death, a new novel by Rick Moody

The Four Fingers of Death, the ninth novel written by award-winning author Rick Moody and published by Hachette Book Group, is scheduled to be released in late July 2010. A deadly serious comedy that “features a hard-luck writer in 2025, whose novelization of a remake of the 1963 horror cult classic, The Crawling Hand, spins a satirical tale of a returning Mars expedition,” here is the promotional blurb for The Four Fingers of Death:

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. 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. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.

Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. 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.

Considering the plot and the publisher, the cover art is so lame I had to replace it with this beautiful 1963 Topps baseball card of Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers great Sandy Koufax.