Now that I’ve exposed myself as pop-punk-loving trash with that post title (this season I’m thankful for Fall Out Boy), I want to talk to you about one of the best things in the world: Thanksgiving. Why is it great? No, not because we get to stuff our faces with delicious turkey, or croissants. It’s because it’s the one day of the year when Americans stop complaining about all that crap we don’t have (like that report I needed on my desk two weeks ago, Donny) and appreciate with a full (ha) heart all the stuff we do have, like the love and support of our families, our jobs, our friends, and of course, our books.

The staff of Lanternfish came together recently to share the books that we’re thankful for. (Except for Donny. Donny doesn’t read. Donny isn’t real. Shh, nobody tell him.)

Christine:

Okay, books I’m thankful for this year…the first one is a no-brainer. It’s gotta be something by Gabriel García Márquez, the granddaddy of magical realism (may he rest in peace, and may his hair turn into a river of copper that grows and grows for all time). I think I’m going to go with The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Soulless Grandmother. It was the first thing I read by Márquez, in a Spanish class when I was fifteen, and it became my gateway drug: an introduction not just to magical realism but also to how much power fiction has to throw you into the perspective of someone very different from you — maybe someone who’s powerless and voiceless and forgotten by the world, except in this book, where she gets to speak.

My second choice is Robert Hilburn’s biography of Johnny Cash, one of my favorite things that I read this year. It’s a long read, maybe a little too long, but worth it, because you get to watch a passionate and complicated life unfold in such detail that in the end you feel like you’ve actually experienced life in someone else’s shoes. The story is told fairly, respectfully, but unflinchingly. I learned a ton about the music industry in the 20th century, about the tensions between living life and making art, and about the soul of an extraordinary man.

Amanda:

First, Lord of the Rings! This book is deeply linked with my childhood. My father bought a leatherbound edition when I was born and started reading it to me (I kid you not) the day I came home from the hospital. So many of my early memories center around this story. Like that time when my dad told me if I ate enough mushrooms I would turn into a hobbit. That didn’t end well. I’m not sure if I was more upset because I was sick, or because I didn’t actually turn into a hobbit. I’d be a very different person without this book in my life.

My second choice is Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys, by Michael Collins. I got curious about this book after I watched a documentary about the Apollo program. I was charmed by Collins’s humility and dry humor in his interviews. The book recounts Collins’s experience as the third member of the Apollo XI mission — the guy who didn’t get to walk on the moon. The way that Collins tells his story is humble and humanizing, a breath of fresh air. The book reminded me of how small and insignificant I am in the scope of the universe, but in a way that was inspiring and empowering too.

Katarina:

A Wrinkle in Time will hold a special place in my heart forever. It was one of the first books my dad ever read to me, and arguably is responsible for me falling in love with books in general. The incredible characters of Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Aunt Beast are still vivid in my imagination. I can still relate to Meg Murray, that young girl struggling to fit in, and I can still feel in awe of her baby brother Charles Wallace, a genius at the age of 6. I loved everything about this book and the special meaning it has for me and my father (who pulled a Jim Dale and voiced every single character in the most theatrical way possible).

The Scarlet Pimpernel, on the other hand, has special familial connections with my mother.  She’s the one who introduced me to the heroic, mysterious hero who saved aristocrats from the guillotine in revolutionary France. My favorite thing about this book, besides it being the first real superhero story (beat it, Batman) that starred a charming and genuinely good man, was that this story focused mostly on his wife, Marguerite. She is such an incredible character, balancing her past and her future, trying to save her brother with the talents and opportunities she’s given, and is ultimately the one responsible for saving her husband. Baroness Orczy won me over with this story, and the fact that I associate it with my mom is just another reason why I’m forever grateful it exists.

Julia:

Les Miserables is one of the books that sparked my interest in studying literature and pursuing a publishing career. I first “read” the book after my grandmother gave me a copy around the time I was in middle school. I fell in love with the story, but at such a young age I wasn’t able to fully grasp its literary qualities. It wasn’t until I re-read the book in high school that I was able to connect more dots, pick out symbolism, and see the transformation of characters from start to end.

My fourth-grade teacher would often read books aloud to the class, mostly stories by Roald Dahl. The BFG was one story that always stuck with me growing up. As a child, I found the idea of someone or something being able to take away my nightmares a pleasant and welcome one. Dahl was able to transform the giant from a terrifying monster into one of the most lovable characters of my childhood. Who wouldn’t want their own Big Friendly Giant?

1984

In Murder, She Wrote (of beloved 80s memory), New York publishing is quite a glamorous profession. But humble Jessica Fletcher, from a tiny town in Maine, isn’t going to let success change her, gosh darn it! Here’s what happens when she goes to visit her editor in New York City.

1. It’s sad in here. The editor has forgotten about us. And we put on fancy clothes and everything. Nice drapes, though.

because editors are too busy and important to remember appointments, obv

2. There goes the editor! OMG quick, catch him! This may be our only chance, he’s got VIP meetings from here to next April!

i’d stop and chat but, you know, private jet waiting

3. The New York editor’s fancy publishing job has bought him a shiny mansion.

bouquet of peach with a ketchupy aftertaste…wait why are you dressed like peter pan again

4. With a butler and everything.

i knew i should have majored in accounting

2014

30 years later, the industry seems to have fallen on some hard times. Pinky the Penguin REALLY needs that next bestseller. Or else.

1. The office is a bit of a fixer-upper.

good price we promis

2. The roof leaks and the walls are a little crackly.

drip drip drip drip drippity drip

3. But at least we’ve still got heat!

i really think pink is your colo

4. And sweet state of the art computer equipment.

wait a minute larry i forgot my aol password

Halloween is here, and like everyone else on the internet, we’re super stoked. Like every year, we’re trying to decide what costumes to don before we venture out into the streets in pursuit of candy. (You’re absolutely never too old to beg for free candy). But even if you aren’t planning on going trick-or-treating, you’re going to want a killer costume. Don’t you want to be the guy that everybody talks about for the rest of the evening with awe? Of course you do. That’s what we’re here for.

So how do you show off your literary prowess while also showing off your costume skills? Leave that to us. (Note: In case you want to get into couple’s costumes with your significant other or bestest friend, each of these includes a “For You & The Boo” section, for some tips on what your costume could be paired with. I chose “boo” because it is both a term of endearment and a thing ghosts say. Get it? It’s festive.)

1. Captain Ahab

Two words: Peg leg!!! How great would it be to walk around your party dressed as a grungy, unkempt old sailor with a missing leg and a terrible attitude? Imagine the beard, the great old age makeup you could do, and the props! (One word: harpoon.) You could go around all night asking partygoers to help you find the Great White Whale, although this could go from entertaining to annoying very quickly if you overact.

For You & the Boo: Convince your best friend or significant other to dress as Moby Dick (literal or figurative), and then tie a rope to each other. Maintain the dead but horrified look on your face as your partner moves angrily through the waves of partygoers.

2. Julius Caesar

Take a bed sheet, wrap it around you like a toga, find some laurels to place on your head, and then go crazy with the fake blood. (Feel free to make your own, and let me know if it works; I’m still looking for some good fake blood recipes). Smear that all over your face, your toga, your arms, just go to town. If you’re really good with things like spirit gum and prosthetics, add some wounds. Then walk around the party all night, stumbling and wide-eyed, and clutch the person next to you and moan, “Et…tu…Brute?” Then collapse. That’s the fun.

For You & the Boo: Get your best friend or significant other to dress as Mark Antony and have them recite the “Friends! Romans! Countrymen!” speech after you die.

3. The Snow Queen

What’s cooler than being cool? Being ice cold.

Okay, okay…

The only problem with this costume is that you could be confused with Elsa from Frozen, but if you’ve got any anxiety about being mistaken for her, you should let it go. (I know what I did. Sorry I’m not sorry.) All you’ve got to do is go all out on this costume: White dress instead of blue, use a muff, wear one of those Russian fur hats, (you can definitely use faux fur, as long as it looks convincing. You think an ice queen cares about animal welfare? She does not.) Emphasize the ice aspect of the snow queen, and maybe carry around a mirror with the word “Eternity” on it. Then when people ask you to sing, you can bash them over the head with your prop. Everybody wins.

For You & the Boo: The Snow Queen has no boo. She is the Snow Queen; her heart is made of ice. So if you must use this for a couples costume, your boo must dress as an ice shard.

4. Jay Gatsby

Dress in a white suit and stare yearningly out of a window for the entire party. That’s it, that’s the costume.

For You & the Boo: Your partner can come dressed as the Green Light (use a morph suit or get really creative with cardboard), and you can follow it around all night.

5. Alternative Jay Gatsby

Dress in a stylish swimsuit. Apply fake blood to your head. Come to the party soaking wet, then play dead for the rest of the evening.

For You & the Boo: The only acceptable companion costume to this is a Nick Carraway, preferably one who cries a lot and monologues the pain of losing Gatsby to anybody who will listen. Only extremely self-confident boos can be trusted with this role.

6. Sherlock Holmes

Sure, he’s a literary character beaten to death by the costume industry, but nevertheless there have been some incredibly inventive variations of this costume done by cosplayers that range from Benedict Cumberbatch’s adaptation to steampunk Holmes! You don’t have to feel trapped with the old deerstalker cap and pipe, but if you feel like using them this Halloween, you do you. If you want to get a feel for how the actual Sherlock Holmes would act and dress, you could always purchase The Legend of Sherlock Holmes from Lanternfish Press, which is coincidentally on sale. (Subtle advertising, I know.)

For You & the Boo: I’ve found Watson makes a good costume companion to Holmes, wouldn’t you say? If not, Irene Adler is always an excellent choice.

7. Dracula

Yes, yes, we know. Dracula has become so overdone and his once-terrifying tale of bloodsucking monstrosities in the heart of sexually repressed Victorian London has been cheapened to a bad toupee and a cape. But never fear! You can easily bring back the terror that once was, by going back to the original book’s descriptions. I’m talking hairy palms, red eyes, receding hairline, creepy fangs. That kind of stuff. Carry jars of dirt with you, as a vampire needs soil from its homeland to survive in another part of the world. Eat some spiders in front of people. If you’ve got a large dog, take him along for a bonus prop as a child of the night. When he howls, say “The children of the night! What music they make!” in your best Transylvanian accent.

For You & the Boo: This could go either way. You could convince your boo to dress as Mina Murray, Victorian dress and bite marks to match, or you could convince them to dress as Renfield, the bug-eater minion. I’d personally rather have my boo dressed as a helpless minion, but it’s up to you.

Portraying illness in literature is a tricky balancing act. On the one hand, it’s easy to treat death and disease as taboo, peppering language with euphemism and metaphor to escape the pesky vulnerable feeling of being mortal. At the other extreme, fascination with the grotesque side of the human body (we’re made of meat, after all) can devolve into lurid sensationalism.

Here are a few books in the history of plague literature that get the balance just right — though if you have a plague phobia, we recommend perhaps not reading them just now.  

1. Kristin Lavransdatter

Trilogy by Norwegian Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset: The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross

     It was nine days since the last death had occurred among the sisters and five days since anyone had died in the convent or the nearest houses. The plague seemed to be waning throughout the countryside as well, said Sira Eiliv. For the first time in three months a glimmer of peace and comfort and security fell over the silent, weary people sitting there. Old Sister Torunn Marta let her rosary sink into her lap and took the hand of the little girl standing at her knee.

     “Well, child, now we seem to be seeing that Mary, the Mother of God, never withdraws her mercy from her children for long.”

     “No, it’s not the Virgin Mary, Sister Torunn. It’s Hel. She’ll leave the parish, taking her rakes and brooms, when they sacrifice an innocent man at the gate of the cemetery. By tomorrow she’ll be far away.”

     “What can she mean?” asked the nun, again uneasy. “Shame on you, Magnhild, for spreading such loathsome, heathen gossip. You deserve to taste the rod for that…”

     “Tell us what you mean, Magnhild. Don’t be afraid.” Kristin was standing behind them; her voice sounded strained. She had suddenly remembered that in her youth she had heard Fru Aashild talk about dreadful, unmentionably sinful measures which the Devil tempted desperate men to try.

     The children had been down in the grove near the parish church at twilight, and some of the boys had wandered over to a sod hut that stood there; they had spied on several men who were making plans. It seemed that these men had captured a small boy named Tore, the son of Steinunn from down by the shore. That night they were going to sacrifice him to Hel, the plague giantess.

2. Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

Coming of age in early 20th-century America: “ the strange and bitter magic of life.”

The sound of this gasping — loud, hoarse, rapid, unbelievable, filling the room, and orchestrating every moment in it — gave to the scene its final note of horror. Ben lay upon the bed below them, drenched in light, like some enormous insect on a naturalist’s table, fighting, while they looked at him, to save with his poor wasted body the life that no one could save for him. It was monstrous, brutal.

     As Eugene approached, Ben’s fear-bright eyes rested upon the younger brother for the first time and bodilessly, without support, he lifted his tortured lungs from the pillow, seizing the boy’s wrists fiercely in the hot white circle of his hands, and gasping in strong terror like a child: “Why have you come? Why have you come home, ‘Gene?”

     The boy stood white and dumb for a moment, while swarming pity and horror rose in him.

     “They gave us a vacation, Ben,” he said presently. “They had to close down on account of the flu.”

3. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron 

Twenty-somethings in medieval Florence escape to a country house, to avoid catching the plague while drinking and telling each other dirty stories.

     As consecrated ground there was not in extent sufficient to provide tombs for the vast multitude of corpses which day and night, and almost every hour, were brought in eager haste to the churches for interment, least of all, if ancient custom were to be observed and a separate resting-place assigned to each, they dug, for each graveyard, as soon as it was full, a huge trench, in which they laid the corpses as they arrived by hundreds at a time, piling them up as merchandise is stowed in the hold of a ship, tier upon tier, each covered with a little earth, until the trench would hold no more. But I spare to rehearse with minute particularity each of the woes that came upon our city, and say in brief, that, harsh as was the tenor of her fortunes, the surrounding country knew no mitigation, for there—not to speak of the castles, each, as it were, a little city in itself—in sequestered village, or on the open champaign, by the wayside, on the farm, in the homestead, the poor hapless husbandmen and their families, forlorn of physicians’ care or servants’ tendance, perished day and night alike, not as men, but rather as beasts. . . .

     Irksome it is to myself to rehearse in detail so sorrowful a history. Wherefore, being minded to pass over so much thereof as I fairly can, I say, that our city, being thus well-nigh depopulated, it so happened, as I afterwards learned from one worthy of credit, that on a Tuesday morning after Divine Service the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella was almost deserted save for the presence of seven young ladies habited sadly in keeping with the season. All were connected either by blood or at least as friends or neighbours and fair and of good understanding were they all, as also of noble birth, gentle manners, and a modest sprightliness. In age none exceeded twenty-eight, or fell short of eighteen years.

At the end of October, Lanternfish Press will be releasing The Afflictions: a mini-encyclopedia of strange and fantastical diseases. Trust me when I say that these illnesses range from the spine-tingling to the thought-provoking.

In honor of the fast-approaching official release (party on November 5, y’all!), we’ve gathered some of literature’s more unusual diseases. If these were real…I might never go outside again.

Plague of Insomnia (Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude)

The Plague of Insomnia strikes the small, secluded town of Macondo when a young orphan named Rebeca makes her way out of the forest. When she is welcomed into the Buendía household, she unwittingly infects her new adoptive family, which in turn spreads the infection throughout the entire town of Macondo.

The plague causes those who are infected to have wide, glowing, cat-like eyes. They can’t sleep, but they aren’t tired in the slightest, and are therefore able to work all day and night. (You know how there’s just not enough time in the day? Well, now there is!)

Sounds like this disease isn’t too bad: You can’t sleep, but you’re not exhausted. You can finally take care of all the things you’ve been meaning to. But there’s a big catch: everyone who becomes infected eventually loses all his or her memories. Victims of the disease forget names, faces, even how simple tools are supposed to work or what basic household items are used for. Eventually they even forget their own identities. Not exactly worth all the extra hours of productivity, after all. 

Spattergroit (J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)

We can’t have a list of fictional ailments without including Harry Potter, right? Spattergroit is only mentioned briefly in the books, but the symptoms are certainly memorable. The infected person develops horrible purple pustules all over their face. After the fungus reaches the throat, the victim becomes mute.

What’s really interesting about this fantastical disease is the cure: you have to stand naked in a barrel of eel’s eyes under the light of a full moon, with a toad’s liver strapped to your throat. Hey, whatever works…but you have to wonder how many experiments the wizard doctors went through before they came up with this particular cure.

Red Death (Edgar Allan Poe, The Masque of the Red Death)

Of course we weren’t going to compile a list of fake diseases and leave out Edgar Allan Poe, either. The Red Death, highly contagious and always fatal, made the wealthy aristocrats of the town barricade themselves in a tower, waiting for the plague to die out with the last of its victims. While they enjoyed masquerade balls and lavish parties, the citizens outside were dying of the gruesome disease.

Victims of the Red Death suffered convulsions, sweated blood, and died within half an hour. That’s right, blood from every pore…nuff said. Maybe the really fantastical thing here is that they lasted a whole half hour. 

Greyscale (George R. R. Martin, A Song of Ice and Fire)

Westeros, home of epic Machiavellian politics and bloody battles, has its share of illness too. This disease is usually fatal, because of course it is. People who contract greyscale are usually children, because George R.R. Martin is a monster, but adults can catch it too, and it’s usually worse for them than it is for the youth of Westeros. It mostly affects those who live in damp, cold climates.

Victims of the disease suffer as their skin grows stiff, crackling, and stone-like. In children, the scales only partially cover the skin, whereas adults usually find their entire bodies covered by the disease. Children who contract the illness and survive are then immune to the rarer and more fatal version of the disease, and can never catch greyscale again. (G.R.R.M.’s little ray of sunshine.) However, they are disabled for the rest of their lives, since parts of their skin are essentially stone. For adults the disease is always fatal, and often drives them insane towards the end.

To treat the disease, the Maesters recommend limes, mustard poultices, and scalding baths, which can help slow its progress. Others claim that cutting off infected limbs stops the spread of infection, but that isn’t always the case (oops). At least sufferers of this illness are no longer contagious after the spread of the growths stops.

Andromeda Strain (Michael Crichton,  The Andromeda Strain)

Michael Crichton’s sci-fi tale has been adapted for television twice, and yet the novel still manages to strike fear into the heart of anyone whose favorite apocalypse scenario is some sort of plague. Part of what makes this disease so realistic is the lovely fact that Crichton (like our Dr. Paralkar) was a medical doctor and had the scientific background to create a fictional disease with more than a touch of realism about it.

Essentially, this disease erodes the walls of blood vessels, triggering a coagulation response (and therefore clogging up your entire circulatory system) or causing cerebral hematomas (usually leading to dementia). The strain is always evolving, which makes it difficult for the scientists to fight, and it also happens to be extremely contagious, as most airborne illnesses are. There is hope, however: the disease can’t survive in the human body if the blood is too acidic or too alkaline. So load up on the citrus, kids.

Those are some of our favorite fictional diseases. Want lots more? Be sure to pick up a copy of “The Afflictions”! It’ll be on sale starting October 31, but you can preorder it now.