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 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. ( )

This is exactly the kind of thing I should love, but unfortunately the execution is pretty stultifying. I just can't slog through this right now. Lovely printing, though.

I got about halfway through and finally asked myself if I was enjoying this book. Sadly - not really, so back to the library it goes... It was just a little too creepy to read the short bits over breakfast - I had expected short stories, but these are encyclopedia entries. ( )

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. ( )

This book is exactly what the title suggests with contributions from Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, Alan Moore, China Miéville, Jeffrey Ford, Kage Baker and many others. Where else could you read about post-traumatic placebosis, female hyper-orgasmic epilepsy, or vestigial elongation of the caudal vertebrae? ( )