Rick Moody

Montese Crandall, a down-on-his-luck writer with a wife who is gravely ill, pens a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror movie, wherein an animated dismembered arm, missing its middle finger, is the only remnant that returns to Earth from a mission to Mars.

A son returns home to look after his mother, abandoned by his stepfather. The novel follows him as he handles the chores, gets drunk and has a romance on the side. The mother, in a wheel chair and incontinent, extracts a promise that he will kill her if she gets worse. In the background hovers the stepfather, unable to decide whether to return. The setting is a wealthy suburb in Connecticut. By the author of The Ice Storm.