There were more flea markets than licensed, tax-paying emporia in Rio Blanco. We used to see Noel at the flea market, which by now took up more than a dozen city blocks. "Ask Noel," my wife said, her eyes full of implacable purpose.
To be honest, the reason for this pestering had most to do with my wife, who'd spend her remaining time on earth counseling me on just how to boost my product. I'd been pestering Noel about a reading for some time, months, despite the fact that Arachnids was not celebrated for its calendar of arts related programming.
Or perhaps they intended to leave the store when instead they were herded into a cluster of uncomfortable petrochemical multi-use furniture modules by Noel Stroop, the hard-drinking owner-operator of the shop in question. The audience consisted of five intrepid and stalwart folks, four out of the five no doubt intent on surfing aimlessly at consoles. This was at a reading in an old-fashioned used-media outlet right here in town, the store called Arachnids, Inc. Or on one occasion back in 2024 I was asked. People often ask me where I get my ideas. The missing digits are reattached, minus the middle finger. One astronaut goes berserk and mutilates Jed's hand.
Jim Rose, which leads to an expansive (and messy) zero-gravity sex scene. Several of the nine astronauts exhibit signs of "interplanetary disinhibitory syndrome." Jed develops a huge crush on Capt. The first half of the novelization, told as a series of blog posts by astronaut Jed Edwards, describes a 2025 NASA mission to Mars gone horribly awry. In the course of his 700-plus-page extravaganza, dedicated to the late Kurt Vonnegut, Moody finds a way to comment on everything from the economic decline brought on by NAFTA to professional baseball's "enhanced" players, self-help books (a marital advice book, Slaughtering Intimacy, prescribes proto-hominid sex, closer to cannibalism than love), the corroding effects of the Internet and the increasingly crass entertainment industry. This is satire with a sobering aftertaste. Here's the setup: Montese Crandall of Rio Blanco, Ariz., a hack writer whose specialty is paring down prose to one-sentence stories (remember Moody's Twitter short story?), has won the chance to write the novelization of the screenplay for The Four Fingers of Death, a 2025 remake of the cheesy 1963 horror film The Crawling Hand. In his dense, provocative and often hilarious ninth book, Rick Moody takes a sly, Swiftian approach to sci-fi, serving up a goofy B-movie-style space opera.
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