Mobile
-
The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric
and Discredited Diseases
Edited by Jeff Vandermeer and Mark Roberts
Night Shade Books
320 pages
$24
Despite your good physical health, you may be mentally aberrant enough to get a kick out of the macabrely entertaining Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases. Purportedly a medical text, the Guide is a handy-dandy medical reference book cataloguing sundry little-known and incredibly bizarre illnesses, all collected and annually updated by Thackery Trajan Lambshead, a sort of Indiana Jones of the medical profession. According to the editors, the good Dr. Lambshead was born in 1900 and is still alive, well, and continuing his medical research from a "hermetically sealed" lab in Wimpering On the Brink, Durkham County, England.
The Lambshead Guide is, of course, a clever, complex, and even challenging fiction that only masquerades as medicine. At times gruesome but only rarely grim, this charming and fantastical compendium (co-edited by fantasy novelist Jeff Vandermeer and SF writer Mark Roberts) contains dozens of disease-descriptions, all of which are illustrated by John Coulthart, a British fantasy artist whom Tate Gallery Curator Simon Wilson once called "the perfect illustrator for Naked Lunch." Coulthart's drawings (a few of which are meant neither for children nor for the squeamish) add further dark charm to a well-designed, illustration-packed book with an amusing Victorian motif.
A look at the various authors of the assorted descriptions reveals a cross-section of the brightest lights in modern fantasy and weird fiction, including novelist Michael Moorcock, comics creator Alan Moore, dark-fantasy wunderkind China Mieville and recent Novello Festival speaker Neil Gaiman. This leads me to diagnose the Lambshead Guide as not only a strange and entertaining literary goof, but also as a fantasy anthology of sorts in which various talented wordsmiths play like so many mad scientists with the physicality of human existence, flirting with death and disease from safe distances.
They clearly had a grand old time while doing so. One author (very obviously on a gleeful roll) contributed no less than four descriptions, while another mocks medical jargon with hilarious strings of impressive nonsense ("slocotomize and displace the tabuclomen by a succession of deepening incisions").
If you've a taste for complex and eccentric fictions, the Lambshead Guide offers you the literary equivalent of a vaguely sinister yet strangely appetizing plate of petit-fours: Queer to the palate, oddly addictive, and made for occasional idle munching rather than a sit-down, straight-through meal.
The book is marbled throughout with not only overt strangeness and a ghoulish ingenuity in generating afflictions, but a welcome playfulness and humor. Readers will find here both descriptions of and cures for such ailments as Delusions of Universal Grandeur and Poetic Lassitude (unable to feed himself, [the victim] is at last only capable of dressing, arranging his hair, and applying a modicum of eye makeup), and learn that those suffering from Fruiting Body Syndrome may see their blood turn to a liquid "most resembling Summer Fruit-Juice (with bits)."
So, gentle readers, should the cleft of your buttocks suddenly begin to bountifully sprout clusters of grapes, or should one nostril dilate alarmingly as the other shrinks to the point of disappearance, or should you suddenly be overcome with an obsessive fantasy involving stuffing your pockets with small change and then climbing to the top of a telephone pole in a thunderstorm, never fear! Open your copy of the Lambshead Guide with trembling hands to find your cure, or, failing that, to learn the circumstances of your colorful and utterly freakish eventual demise.
The Thackery T. Lambshead Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases has a website at http://www.lambshead guide.com/.
Speaking of Arts_.html, 5.00000
-
A Family Affair
Dec 12, 2007 -
Darrell Roach
Dec 12, 2007 -
Body Talk
Dec 12, 2007 - More »
Latest in Books
More by Jennifer Saylor
-
2003 Lit Roundup
Dec 24, 2003 -
Where Hope Isn't An Option
Dec 10, 2003 -
CL Recommends
Aug 13, 2003 - More »
Calendar
-
An Evening With Phil Rosenthal Of "Somebody Feed Phil" @ Knight Theater
- Fri., April 19, 7 p.m.
-
-
Kountry Wayne: The King Of Hearts Tour @ Ovens Auditorium
- Fri., April 19, 7:30 p.m.
-
-
NEW WINDOW GALLERY-Pat Rhea-ACRYLIC PAINTINGS-April 05-30 2024 VALDESE, NC 28690 @ New Window Gallery/Play It Again Records
- Through April 30, 12 p.m.
-
Trap & Paint + Karaoke @ Zodiac Bar & Grill
- Fridays, 8-10 p.m. Continues through June 28
-
-
LIVE MUSIC FRIDAYS!!! @ Elizabeth Parlour Room
- Fridays, 8-11 p.m. Continues through June 28
-
-
Susan Brenner Examines Upheaval While Celebrating Trees
Chaos and beauty
-
Fall Guide: Upcoming festivals, comedy shows, visual arts events and more
-
Failure To Communicate
Worthy play could use more nuance
