For that reason, I found that I wasn't able to read too much of this Pocket Guide at any one sitting. See, it's ostensibly a medical guide to, as its title suggests, a variety of diseases which fall somewhat beyond the compass of orthodox diagnosis. Its major part is comprised of individual entries for particular diseases (submitted by a long roll call of worthies including Miéville, Moorcock, Gaiman and Alan Moore), ranging from: Ballistic Organ Syndrome, which: "manifests as a sudden, explosive discharge of one or more bodily organs at high velocity; this exit may be accompanied by some pain"; to Inverted Drowning Syndrome; to Mongolian Death Worm Infestation, to Postal Carriers' Brain Fluke Syndrome, propagated by flukes whose mode of dissemination is so elaborate and dependent on fortuities that they seem to be "performing an extinction-defying trapeze act purely for the sake of impressing other parasites" (with accompanying footnote to a book entitled Vanity: Watch Spring of Evolution); to Reverse Pinocchio Syndrome, in which people who tell a great number of lies are eventually afflicted by the development of a black hole in one nostril once it has developed its own gravity, eventually resulting in the skull being sucked into the black hole itself. Scores of them, each detailed in terms of symptoms, first known case, treatment and cures, etc. Gross, and funny.
Also includes a publishing history of the Pocket Guide (this is supposedly the 83rd edition) complete with reproductions of covers and entries from past editions, an 'obscure medical history of the twentieth century', in which phenomena including but far from limited to the career and demise of Freud, Stalingrad, the Kennedy assassination, and AIDS are explained in terms of the diseases enumerated, various reminiscences written by other doctors who have encountered the formidable Lambshead in the course of his storied career, an introduction by the centenarian Lambshead himself, and various other odds and ends, including 'a disease guide benediction for the health & safety of all contributors, readers, and (sympathetic) reviewers', which concludes (and this made me laugh out loud - too much philosophy for me lately, obviously):
Z is for Zeno's paradoxysm, which fills us with misgiving,
By infinitely tiny steps it deadens but won't kill.
As no one could be sure if Aunt Augusta was still living
We propped her in her favorite chair to wait. She's waiting still.
So obviously all of this is made up, from the diseases themselves to the spurious biography and historiography of Lambshead and the Guide. On one level, it satirises the pretension of medical guides and the language and style in which they're written. But that's really just a launching-pad for some very postmodern imaginative pyrotechnics, as many of the disease entries are written by authors who've apparently been infected by the diseases themselves, other of the diseases can be transmitted by being read about, and self-referentiality, inter-textuality (Borges - a natural touchstone for this kind of speculative writing - is mentioned as often as made-up legends of the eccentric disease field), and so on. Definitely recommendable, though some might find its general attitude of too-clever-for-its-own-goodness to be a bit annoying.
Some information here.
