Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without books?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

Today I'm very happy to have as my guest, Rick Moody, whose most recent book is The Four Fingers of Death.

Now, in 1963, there was a terrible Z-rated science fiction horror movie called The Crawling Hand.

It's the kind of thing where this hand from outer space strangles the characters, and you can see the actor holding the plastic hand strangling himself. It's cheesy to beat the band. Rick Moody imagines that in the year

2025 there's a remake called The Crawling Hand.

And the novelization of this remake of this grade Z science fiction movie is done by a non-writer

completely in grief who takes 720 pages to get this novelization written.

The result is the novel we're talking about the Four Fingers of Death by my guest, Rick Moody.

Now, why all the crisis, Rick?

You know, as I've been wandering around talking about the book, people have asked me

if I believe its predictions are accurate. And I keep saying that I don't see that it's the

role of speculative fiction to be accurate in its predictions so much as it is accurate in its

appraisal of what's happening around us in the

present instance. And that sort of allegorical superstructure is what makes it so exciting. It's what

makes the imagination at the heart of speculative fiction so exciting. To me, anyway, I love that

...