Moody, Rick
Entry updated 12 September 2022. Tagged: Author.
(1961- ) US author whose novels, beginning with Garden State (1992), tend to focus on the travails of survival in late twentieth-century urban America, the best known of these tales being The Ice Storm (1994). Two of the three novellas assembled in Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (coll 2007) edge close to the fantastic; the third, "The Albertine Notes" (in McSweeney's Mammoth Treasure of Thrilling Tales, anth 2003, ed Michael Chabon), is set in a Near Future Manhattan (see New York) after a Disaster has wiped out much of the island, an event perceived by the tales protagonists through the actions of a drug called albertine (a reference to Marcel Proust) which seems to act simultaneously to cause deeply desired Amnesia but also to redeem the pre-disaster past. The Four Fingers of Death (2010), set in 2025, is almost entirely devoted to a novelization of The Crawling Hand (1963), radically transforming the original film, in which a dead astronaut's hand horrifically possesses those in contact with it; the Satire of American culture is unremitting, though often comic. [JC]
see also: Mars.
Hiram Frederick Moody III
born New York: 18 October 1961
works (selected)
- Right Livelihoods: Three Novellas (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2007) [coll: hb/Julianna Lee]
- The Four Fingers of Death (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2010) [hb/Ronald Kurniawan]
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