I got this for Collin, thinking it was odd enough he might be interested. He wasn't, and I read it anyway, and I wasn't either.
The book is a fictional biography of Dr. Spencer Black, from a childhood spent exhuming corpses through his medical training, his travels with carnivals, and the mysterious disappearance at the end of his life, and includes his supposed magnum opus: The Codex Extinct Animalia, a Gray’s Anatomy for mythological beasts — dragons, centaurs, Pegasus, Cerberus—all rendered in detailed anatomical illustrations.
It was an original book and I always like when authors try to fit a paranormal-ish story alongside historical fact, but it just never engaged me much.