The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited
Diseases
edited by Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts
Night Shade Books / 320 p / $24
ISBN: 1892389541
If you are unacquainted with the very strange (and outstanding) work
of Jeff VanderMeer, don't expect ME to explain it. For those of you
who can remember Devo, it's comparable. Devo was as much performance
art as it was music; VanderMeer's more outrageous stuff is as much
performance art as literature. This time he is aided and abetted by
co-editor Mark Roberts and the premise is a guide to imaginary
diseases. Spectacularly packaged by book designer John Coulthart, this
incomparable compendium of the bizarre is, by any measure, unequalled.
I'm not sure how civilization has managed without it. I'm not sure how
civilization will manage with it, either. With contributions from Kage
Baker, Alan M. Clark, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman Jeffrey Ford, Harvey
Jacobs, China Mieville, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Steve Rasnic
Tem, Gahan Wilson, and a bunch of other sick puppies from the fantasy
farm, unless you are fatally mundane, this one is not to be missed.
-- Cemetery Dance #47
If you are unacquainted with the very strange (and outstanding) work
of Jeff VanderMeer, don't expect ME to explain it. For those of you
who can remember Devo, it's comparable. Devo was as much performance
art as it was music; VanderMeer's more outrageous stuff is as much
performance art as literature. This time he is aided and abetted by
co-editor Mark Roberts and the premise is a guide to imaginary
diseases. Spectacularly packaged by book designer John Coulthart, this
incomparable compendium of the bizarre is, by any measure, unequalled.
I'm not sure how civilization has managed without it. I'm not sure how
civilization will manage with it, either. With contributions from Kage
Baker, Alan M. Clark, Cory Doctorow, Neil Gaiman Jeffrey Ford, Harvey
Jacobs, China Mieville, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, Steve Rasnic
Tem, Gahan Wilson, and a bunch of other sick puppies from the fantasy
farm, unless you are fatally mundane, this one is not to be missed.
-- Cemetery Dance #47