The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases

The idea behind this is delightfully, deliciously weird. It's a compendium of surreal and impossible diseases, a publishing tradition supposedly started by the colorful (and very fictional) Dr. Thackery T. Lambshead, some of whose exploits are described here, as well. It's got some very talented contributors, and you sort of have to admire everybody's deadpan commitment to the gimmick, but overall it's just so much better in concept than in execution. Some of the individual entries are pretty cool, yes, but for the most part it's more of an interesting curiosity than something that's genuinely fun to read, especially as after a while many of the entries start to feel fairly similar. (I mean, it's not that "this is a disease that's show more transmitted through language, and oh no, by virtue of having read these words, you, dear reader, might now be infected too!" isn't a nice, creepy idea, but it's the kind of nice, creepy idea that immediately suggests itself to multiple people, apparently.) And there's a long section at the end about how these bizarre diseases secretly shaped 20th century history or something, which uses the real deaths of real people, and various tragedies and horrors of recent history, in a way that frankly seems in rather poor taste.

Rating: 3/5, and that may be rating it half a star too high, honestly, just because I really did love the concept and really, really wanted to like the results. show less

Purporting to be the latest edition of a long-standing medical guide, Lambshead is, in reality, an anthology featuring several of today's best fantasists working at the top of their game. Some entries are humorous, others are serious, but all are enjoyable. There's a sense of fun to this book that's quite...well...infectious.

Editors VanderMeer and Roberts have assembled a stellar crew of cohorts, and everyone is clearly on the same page. The internal references in the various entries to Dr. Lambshead’s personal history or to a similar reference book by one Dr. Buckhead Mudthumper are remarkably consistent and lend just the right veneer of verisimilitude.

Parody and satire are difficult to get just right -- if the tone isn’t perfect, show more the piece loses its punch and the humor is lost. What’s terrific about the Guide is a palpable sense of just how much fun the authors and editors were having writing these pieces and putting them together. It could easily have turned into a giant in-joke, or worse, a cliquish “if you were one of us, you’d be howling right now” affair. Miraculously, it’s neither. Instead it’s a fun and funny treat.

I mean, where else are you going to find writers like Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Kage Baker, and China Mieville (not to mention Steve Aylett, Rikki Ducornet, Paul Di Filippo, Cory Doctorow, and about 30 others) all tied up in one tasty package? Where else are you going to find a description of afflictions like Ballistic Organ Syndrome, described as “a sudden, explosive discharge of one or more bodily organs at high velocity?” Or Fuseli’s Disease, where the contagion (which is highly infectious) occurs only in the sufferer’s dreams? Or Monochomitis, which is characterized by “the stark raving abhorrence of color, often accompanied by an intense longing for the way things used to be?”

And Thackery offers up even more treats for the booklover. It’s a gorgeous book. John Coulthart’s cover art is both attractive and appropriate, consisting of a montage of old medical charts and illustrations, medical instruments, and a number of previous covers for past editions of the guide. This meticulous attention to detail is carried through in the internal design and illustrations. Everything is well done, right down to the fabulous endpapers. Even without the cover, the book is gorgeous, and the symbol on the front is a wonderful quiet joke for the conscientious reader.

The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric and Discredited Diseases is a shining example of what an anthology should be: a seamless collaboration of inventive minds which comes together in a whole that is significantly greater than it’s individual parts. The fact that it’s also a beautiful piece of art and funny as hell is just gravy. show less

Thackery T Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases is not the sort of book that one sits down and reads in a continuous fashion. It is best read in small doses, and is most effective if read while seated on that special chair we all favor for such reading material. In fact, there should be a warning to the effect that if too much is read at one time, the reader may contract Lambsheadadosis, or what is also commonly known as Thakery’s Syndrome.

This affliction is caused by the reader absorbing too many of the chronic contagious catarrhs chronicled by the medical staff in the preparation of the Guide. Obvious symptoms of persons so infected will include an extreme fascination with medical literature pertaining to show more obscure diseases and the ability to find them rather commonplace and in abundance, to find such diseases on a regular basis and, failing that, treat every subtle rash, congestion and malady as a newly discovered pox that threatens the very existence of mankind. In more advanced cases, the sufferer of Thackery’s Syndrome will have adopted a pseudo-Victorian dialect with overtones of having a quasi-medical background and pronounced use of arcane linguistic phraseology, although it is only in rare cases, that they actually sound like a duck.

Doctors Jeff VanderMeer, Mark Roberts, Neil Gamin and the rest of the contributing staff are to be highly complimented for this collection. Without their collected knowledge, I would have never realized what maladies I am capable of suffer from. Four stars and my highest compliments. show less

Because of my natural inclination towards interesting diseases, my brother passed on to me the Thackery Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases. Now one should note that this is a fake medical guide. Each diseases (written by an absurdly large collection of great fiction authors including Gaiman, Mieville, Moore and others) is given two or three pages to describe symptoms, a case history, epidemiology. The best are the diseases that are contagious simply by reading about them or touching the pages (Printer's Evil). Some are just creepy (Tian Shan-Gobi Assimilation which is transmitted by enraging onlookers who then proceed to dismember a victim), and some are simply too close to a real disease (Inverted Drowning show more Syndrome in which one liquefies is just a little to close to cholera for my tastes). Strangely it satisfied my sick and twisted predilection for horror/fantasy mixed with just the right element of victorianism, epidemiology, and fake scientific jargon. A delight for wierd people like me. show less

Book Info: Genre: Medical Guide Satire/Speculative fiction shorts
Reading Level: Adult
Recommended for: Anyone who likes a laugh

My Thoughts: If you want to know what sort of lunacy to expect from this book, here is just a tiny taste.
Discussing Ballistic Organ Syndrome: “In rare cases, the Ballistitis virus infects the patient's entire body. Eventually, some event causes one or more cells to rupture, after which the patient's body is disrupted in an explosive ejection of all bodily organs. This manifestation of the syndrome frequently occasions the death of the patient; at best, the loss of all bodily organs will cause considerable inconvenience and distress (as set out in Doctor Buckhead Mudthumper's Encyclopedia of Forgotten Oriental show more Diseases).” [pg. 4]

Letter to Dr. Wexler, of whom the writers are not fond: “Dear Sir: Kindly send your anthrax-soaked missives elsewhere. And if you want to get serious about contagious letters, then invest in some smallpox like a normal person.” [pg. 286]
There are also a couple cookbooks mentioned that sound interesting: “French Cuisine with Codeine” and “Mousses with Morphine”.

I will point out that I would not say this book is lavishly illustrated. Each entry generally has only a single illustration; sometimes there is a second at the end of the section. Now, The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities, which I'll be reading and reviewing next, does have a lot of pictures. But this one, not so much.

Still, if you like a laugh, you'll enjoy the clever way each author creates a “character” for themselves, and the creative uses of real information mixed with their own creations that fill this satirical book. I enjoyed it a lot.

Disclosure: I bought this book for myself. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis: “Imagine if Monty Python wrote the Mayo Clinic Family Health Book, and you sort of get the idea. Afraid you’re afflicted with an unknown malady? Finally you have a place to turn!” —Book Sense

You hold in your hands the most complete and official guide to imaginary ailments ever assembled—each disease carefully documented by the most stellar collection of speculative fiction writers ever to play doctor. Detailed within for your reading and diagnostic pleasure are the frightening, ridiculous, and downright absurdly hilarious symptoms, histories, and possible cures to all the ills human flesh isn’t heir to, including Ballistic Organ Disease, Delusions of Universal Grandeur, and Reverse Pinocchio Syndrome.

Lavishly illustrated with cunning examples of everything that can’t go wrong with you, the Lambshead Guide provides a healthy dose of good humor and relief for hypochondriacs, pessimists, and lovers of imaginative fiction everywhere. Even if you don’t have Pentzler’s Lubriciousness or Tian Shan-Gobi Assimilation, the cure for whatever seriousness may ail you is in this remarkable collection. show less

The basic idea behind this book is one of brilliance: Take a group of scattered science fiction writers and have them come up with absurd, funny diseases and then tie the whole thing together with a history and personal accounts about the titular disease-obsessed doctor. For the most part it works. The main chunk of the texts, the various entries concerning diseases such as "Ballistic Organ Syndrome" and "Razornail Bone Rot," has some great comedy writing from Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, China Mieville and other modern sci-fi luminaries. While the entries can be hit and miss, they contain enough brilliant descriptions and clever metafictional games to make the whole a highly entertaining read. The editors' biographical show more and historical notes are dryly witty and set the book on the right tone. However, the various accounts of the doctor's life from different writers, which brings the book to a close, are almost uniformly dull and could have been lopped off without much loss to the whole. Still, a solid collection for fans of great humor writing and science fiction alike.

(This review originally appeared on zombieunderground.net) show less

This was a lot of fun. From the entries to the historical review, to the notes on each author. By the time you get to the end you feel like Dr. Gaiman and Dr. Mieville and all the others actually exist (and I guess they do, kinda), but especially Dr. Lambshead. He becomes a legendary figure like Allan Quartermaine or Captain Nemo.

Makes a great bathroom book because the entries are short (mostly). I was sad that half of the pages dis-attached from the binding after reading it for a week or two, hopefully that wasn't something common.