For something I liked so much, this took me a really long time to read. I'd never read Moody before, but this seems to be regarded as his magnum opus, and it's not hard to see why. There's the meta novel - a beat down guy living in a somewhat dystopian future is losing his wife to disease, collects baseball cards, writes one-sentence short stories, and decides to play a game of chess for the right to write the novelization of the remake of a bad 1960's horror movie, The Crawling Hand.
And because he's a writer of one-sentence short fiction, his adaptation of the movie is (interestingly) long-winded, introspective, and pretty much goes off the rails. The first part is a first-person narration of the first manned mission to Mars, which goes horribly wrong and results in the narrator's severed arm returning to Earth infected with a virus and the ability to crawl around on its own.
The last part, is about a researcher trying to track down the arm in an attempt to reanimate his dead wife. And there's a talking chimp that falls in love with one of the lab assistants. And there's this cult-like Burning Man-type gathering that wants to shoot the arm back into space. And a battering ram kind of sex toy. And Mexican wrestlers - or guys dressed like them, armed with tasers.
And, yes, it's all very, very good. I will read more Moody.
