cut the last sentence

rick moody can write leafy connecticut suburbs as skillfully as post-apocalyptic new york city, but i'm excited to hear that his latest novel (working title THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH) promises to be more of the latter, ALBERTINE NOTES variety. also "montese crandall" sounds like a character in a flannery o'connor story....what luck. novel should be out spring 2010. interview, plus moody's "13 rules of revision" here:

NT: Let's talk about your newest novel. Unless you are superstitious, could you talk about what it is about and how long you've been working on it?

RM: Not superstitious, really, but it's a hard book to talk about. It began in two ways: 1) I really love bad, old horror movies, the b-film variety, the drive-in variety, especially from the late fifties and early sixties, which was the period of horror films that I watched a lot as a kid. I just loved them. In this novel, I wanted to try to make my own one of these films, so I picked a particularly embarrassing example, THE CRAWLING HAND (1963), and began adapting it. 2) Meanwhile, I wanted to write a book about the desert, because I have been spending a lot of time in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona in the last ten years. Or, if not a book ABOUT the desert, at least a book LOCATED in the desert. Then (3) if those things weren't enough, I allowed a name from my book to be auctioned off by a first-amendment-related charity in California. The winner, he who paid the top dollar, got to have his name in my book. The winner was one Montese Crandall. Upon having control of this name, which I loved so much, I had to create a context for him in the novel, so he became the narrator and controlling intelligence thereof. In ways that will become clear when you see it. Well, there's another factor, too. (4) I wanted to write a novel in the style of the novels I first loved when I was a teenager, viz.,Vonnegut/Brautigan/Robbins/Pynchon/Dick/Heinlein. It's a sub-literary genre in some cases, but I never care about that sort of thing. I want write into the condition of my early enthusiasm, you know? Anyway, the result is a 900 page comic novel about a disembodied arm set in the desert in 2026.