Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome

TerrorTome #1

by Garth Marenghi

Dare you crack open the TerrorTome? (Mind the spine)

When horror writer Nick Steen gets sucked into a cursed typewriter by the terrifying Type-Face, Dark Lord of the Prolix, the hellish visions inside his head are unleashed for real. Forced to fight his escaping imagination – now leaking out of his own brain – Nick must defend the town of Stalkford from his own fictional horrors, including avascular-necrosis-obsessed serial killer Nelson Strain and Nick’s dreaded throppleganger, the Dark Third.

Can he and Roz, his frequently incorrect female editor, hunt down these incarnate denizens of Nick’s rampaging imaginata before they destroy Stalkford, outer Stalkford and possibly slightly further?

From the twisted genius of horror master Garth Marenghi – Frighternerman, Darkscribe, Doomsage (plus Man-Shee) – come three dark tales from his long-lost multi-volume TerrorTome.

Can a brain leak?
(Yes, it can)

Genres: Horror, Fiction, Comedy, Audiobook, Humor, Fantasy, Satire

295 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 3, 2022

Reviews

[Georgia · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the joke.
I get the joke.
It’s done well.

It goes on for far too long.

[Stuart Yellop · Rating 5 out of 5]

He's Garth Marenghi. Author. Dreamweaver. Visionary. Plus actor.

You are about to enter the world of his imagination. You are entering ... his TerrorTome.

For years, our humble fabulist has given us such shudderwork as 'Afterbirth', in which a mutated placenta attacks Bristol. Now, our favourite doomscribe has given us a collection of three novellas - or, as he calls them, 'short novels'.

I managed to buy my copy almost a week before release. Mayhap, the Dark Forces of the Nether Pit conspired to send this worthy volume to my trembling meat-clamps. Or the staff shelved it early. Ne'er you mind, traveller. What follows is a review of this magnum opus horrificatus.

'Type-Face (Dark Lord of the Prolix)' explores what would (of course) happen when a brilliant-but-unappreciated horror writer becomes erotically addicted to a possessed typewriter.

'Bride of Bone' considers the limits of Man's knowledge - and whether living skeletons should make an army of Boners to conquer the world.

Lastly, 'The Dark Fractions' discusses what would happen if the infinite facets of a complex-but-compelling terror-maven were to take human form. In Mexican wrestling shorts and biker jackets.

So sit back, relax on a sofa - or on a beanbag, if that's how you choose to live your life - and delve into the murky depths of Garth Marenghi's fear-soup.

Savour.

[Rusty Ray Guns · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just incredible brilliant amazing.
I do hope there is more to come the parody of the golden age of horror novels it both ridiculous and completely believable.
Had me crying with laughter and loved ever second .
Looking forward to reading it again.

[Alex Nagler · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is poorly written and in need of an editor. Perfection.

[Thomas Hurley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author doesn't use subtext like a coward.

[Charlotte May · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read purely because a colleague lent it to me and I felt obligated 😂

Not really my thing, it was silly (which I know is the point) but funny in places too.

Nick Steen is the author of hundreds of horror books, when his storylines and ideas escape his mind and start wreaking havoc, Nick along with his editor Rox must find a way to fight back.

[Nick Harland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haven't read it yet, but the very prospect of leafing through these horror-filled pages is making me shiver. My terror level at the idea of reading this masterpiece is already at 5 stars, therefore the book must be rated 5 stars. Petrifying.

[Adam Shergold · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best way to enjoy this is alongside the audiobook, as many others have mentioned.
I've never laughed so hard at a book before, especially with Holness' in-character narration. Marenghi is the only horror writer brave enough to tackle the question of what if a man entered a highly sexual relationship with his haunted typewriter.

[Alex (The Bookubus) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must-have for any self-respecting horror reader. Horny typewriters, bone brides and throppelgangers abound in this latest offering from the Dreamweaver. It's so goddamn radical it even includes Fright Breaks and a Horrotica section. Now please excuse me while I track down the Scabman series.

[Gareth · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

If you like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace then you’ll have a good time with this novel/trilogy of linked novellas, all with the kind of so-bad-it’s-good horror clunkiness and hilarious authorial pomposity of the series. The audiobook seems the ideal way to experience it, with Marenghi’s - shall we say - unique style of acting to enhance the grisly details. It’s admittedly a bit long and at times the wackiness did get a little hard to keep track of, but it’s difficult to know how much of that is really just the joke. I’d wager it’s exactly what you’re expecting, mostly in a good way.

[Lizz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t write reviews.


And I can’t describe this insanity.

‘“Hellllll!” he screamed, breaking down suddenly and falling to his knees. “If I had known I’d inadvertently invoke an army of spirit-doubles hellbent on my own destruction, cause a permanent rift in my lifelong friendship with a psychic dugong, lose the friendship plus life of a loyal, yet imperfect, editor, then get attacked by a demonic wrestler before falling into an infinite tunnel, I wouldn’t have written that bloody book about the Dark Fraction in the first place!”’

I had a great time with the terrifying master of horrific scary things. If you too want to be monstrously frightened for eternity, I recommend listening to this book. The jokes just won’t be funny if you read them. I mean …. The maelstrom of fear storms. Never jokes.

[Nick · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF. This novel failed to work for me. I love Garth Marenghi the TV show, but found the humour didn't translate to the page. The funny-crappiness of Marenghi is a lot less fun when you actually have to read it rather than laugh at it. The explicit descriptions of torture and pain didn't work for me--don't get me wrong, I don't mind explicit descriptions like that, but it was out of kilter with what I was expecting. It was neither horrific (because it was too camp and overblown) nor was it funny (because... well, it isn't) nor was it in keeping with what I was expecting (since the TV show was never just pages of, admittedly tongue in cheek, torture porn).

But lots of people seem to love it. So I think this is just an acquired taste.

[clumsyplankton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I got this book in preparation to see Garth live and after loving dark place I thought I’d love this aswell. I was not disappointed this was absolutely hilarious and such a good read

[Zak · Rating 1 out of 5]

After 78 pages of the same thing, I gave up. Yeah, it has its moments of hilarity, but the same gag is used over and over, and what at first seems like a new one, it later reveals to be, well, PLOT TWIST, to be the same one with a lot of fat surrounding it.


The satire didn't appeal to me. I know the joke is centred in Garth's obvious "talent," that or not so much talent, but the biggest joke is having to struggle through almost 300 pages worth of it.


I'm glad I didn't do that.

I'm not into Garth G or his work.

Matthew Holness is a superb filmmaker, so, much like his mate Richard Ayoade, I say, stick at that, and make more films instead of your terrible career swerves and moves as novelists.

Even if it's deliberately bad, I didn't enjoy it for all of its satirical genius. It isn't genius, nor funny. It's lazy and embarrassing.

[Simon Pressinger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Listen to this. Get the audiobook. Plus the book. Fans of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace will inevitably hear his unique voice while reading, but for a proper experience that follows naturally from the TV show format, you should listen to this one.

TerrorTome is made up of three short novels (not novellas because the fact is they're short novels, Marenghi asserts). They're all funny, but the first story, 'Type-Face, Dark Lord of the Prolix' is the funniest and most brilliant, most outrageous, most goddamn radical story I've listened to this year and is alone worth the price of the book.

Get ready to enter the world of Garth Marenghi's imagination...

[Matti · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was exactly what I wanted and expected, hilariously bad in the best way. The fact that it goes on for a bit too long feels like it's just part of the joke to me. The audiobook was perfect too and I'd recommend it for the credits alone. What a fun, ridiculous ride 👍

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

See, I purchased a cursed typewriter from the reincarnation of a dead novelist, whose life's work I'd once shredded in front of his aging, watery eyes, and as a result of the guy's occult-fuelled fury, I was drawn unwittingly into a destructive psycho-sexual relationship with the machine, which eventually sucked me into it via nipple chains and sparklers, through to an alternate realm of lost words called the Prolix, ruled by a terrifying and all-powerful demon known as Type-Face, Dark Lord of Misrulery.

Garth Marenghi is a legend in cult horror circles, possessing an indefatigable imagination only rivalled by his courage to explore those deep, dark recesses of the human psyche. He's a firebrand of twisted tales and an unparalleled mind.

He's also fictional, but that's less important.

First introduced in the short-lived cult classic Garth Marenghi's Darkplace almost twenty years ago, the character reintroduces himself in the most glorious of meta ways in TerrorTome. Within these pages we have Marenghi's first mainstream publishing, and they are as pretentiously hackneyed as any episode from the original series.

The inspiration for Marenghi — a prolific horror writer of the 1980s, donning the distinct concaine-fuelled aura of Stephen King of that era, just replaced with comedic levels of self-aggrandizement — is obvious, but only acts as a jumping off point for some awe-inspiringly unpolished speculative fiction this side of a fanzine.

Here Marenghi tells three stories surrounding his author-insert, Nick Steen, a writer of unparalleled (and presumably unedited) vision in an unappreciative near-sighted world.

The first story, Typeface is a very literal explication of the potentially masturbatory nature of writing. Steen purchases an ancient typewriter to help excavate the depths of his haunting imagination, and to tap into its properties he must plug himself into it through his orifices and erogenous zones (nipple clamps are mentioned) — of course, its a sentient typewriter and Nick, obviously, has a torrid affair with in pursuit of his art and its just as stupid as it sounds.

Other than the ridiculous premise, its the little details that make this book work, the quirks that situate us into Marenghi's eighties machismo sensibilities. Unironically using the word capisce in a attempt to appear aloof, describing Roz, his female editor, as having a "lady's handbag", "lady's torch", "lady's mirror", "lady's nails" — with the pedantry of a man trying to distance himself from any implication that he'd be familiar with such things.

His favourite adjective for her is "hysterical" and synonyms to that effect. Even when he writes from Roz's perspective in the second story, Bride of Bone, his disinterest is palpable:

Was that thing in the lab coat really, honestly alive? She paused for a moment, exhausted by her own endless and now borderline irritating questioning.

It's just perfectly terrible in the best way.

At the same time, TerrorTome probably won't hit as hard if you're not familiar with the series. That isn't to say the incomprehensibly indulgent ramblings of a fictional horror writer isn't funny without the fulcrum of the series, it'll just certainly be funnier.

[Mirnes Alispahić · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garth Marenghi. Author. Dream weaver. Visionary. Plus actor. He's one of the few people you'll meet who wrote more books than he's read. During the 1980's he wrote, directed, and starred in a series so radical and crazy that the powers to be were so afraid to air that they gypped him, much in the same way women have done since they've sniffed his money. The series' name was Darkplace, finally aired in 2004. in a period of artistic drought.
"TerrorTome" is a collection of three connected novellas, each more ludicrous than the previous, about Nick Steen, a horror writer, an alter ego of Garth Marenghi, who is, in turn, the alter ego of Matthew Holness. Talking about metafiction, eh? It would've been better if this came out when the series was airing, as it perhaps would prolong its airing time and give us more of that brilliance. Alas, I'll take more of Garth Marenghi's bad writing any time and in any form.
If you're a fan of cheesy horror novels and movies from '70s and '80s you'll enjoy this. If you're a fan of Garth Marenghi, you'll enjoy this. But be warned, it's bad. Really bad. Like bad. So bad it's good.

[Samuel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I'm in a highly destructive and damaging psychosexual relationship with my typewriter."

Horror comedy is a tricky thing to get right, often feeling derivative, cliche or simply not very funny, but Garth Marenghi’s Terrortome was a real treat. Consisting of three connected 'tales of terror', Terrortome follows insufferable pulp horror writer Nick Steen (a fictional character invented by Garth Marenghi who himself is a fictional character and a horror writer) as he enters into an unholy deal with a demonic and kinky typewriter called Type Face - Dark Lord of the Prolix (i.e. Steen's own mind), then battles a maniacal serial killer with a gruesome obsession for human bones, and finally is forced to confront a host of his own nefarious doppelgangers.

Yes Terrortome is cheesy, sexist, gross, and completely over the top, but most of all it’s hilarious. I highly recommend getting the audio version, which is narrated by Garth Marenghi himself. The superb voice acting for the various characters adds an extra layer of comedy to an already very funny book.

[J K · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unholy merging of the silliest parts of 1980-1990s shock horror. Takes itself absolutely seriously in the funniest way possible. It unlocked a lot of memories of reading exactly this kind of deathless prose, stretched to be even more deathless, which makes it about the most deathless prose out there. The footnotes are a particular joy.

You'll probably enjoy this as long as you're even vaguely familiar with this era of horror. The awkward buddy-talk really hit the spot. It can't really have been this cheesy, can it? Almost too bad in places, but there's also a narrative to keep you invested. The end of chapter cliffhangers were perfectly ridiculous.

Now to rewatch Dark Place and delve back into some of the pulp novels from whence this was conceived.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely ridiculous, absurd escapism, which is precisely what I needed in my life right now... for reasons... I don't remember the last time I laughed so much listening to a book. (I'm not even sure if this is available in physical form but Garth himself narrates this so I wouldn't have it any other way.) If you remember fondly that old gem of a 6 episode tv show from 20 years ago called Darkplace, then you absolutely will want to listen to this. Purposefully bad writing this entertaining has to take some incredible talent and creativity.
I also only just learned that there are more of these. Hail Matthew Holness, I mean... Garth Marenghi!
4/5

[Martyn Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since 2004’s blockbuster Channel 4 horror TV show, I’ve been a fan of Garth. The faux-80s horror series tapped right into my love of crappy, low-budget horror movies that my video store wouldn’t let me rent. So when the TV concept is replicated for a pulp paper-back horror some 18 years later, it was an unexpected but very welcomed surprise!

This book is obviously heavily influenced by the TV show, but also Stephen King, and feels a bit X-Files in places too, with countless other thematic references, without relying on any knowledge of any of the above. So if you haven’t seen the show, there’s nothing to worry about. You can jump right in and enjoy a cheesy, overblown, po-faced horror parody that trips over the tropes repeatedly to humorous effect.

It’s a pretty tricky thing to describe, so I’ve picked out some of my personal laugh out loud moments.

——

Nick saw it and yanked on the car’s handbrake, killing the engine, but kept the wiper blades going…

‘Dammit, you’ll drain the battery if you keep those wipers going,’ yelled Capello. ‘Do you want to kill us?’

‘Ease off, Capello. It’s just while we discuss the abandoned facility ahead of us. Then when we’ve done that, I’ll switch them off before we head out. In any case, there are worse ways of draining a car’s battery without you realising. Leaving the main headlights on, for example. Ditto the radio, cassette or CD-player. Even leaving the car door open while you’re outside is a killer, in all likelihood triggering the internal cabin lights without you realising. So less of the damned attitude.’

—————

If I was lucky, I had around forty years of life left. Fifty if I gave up red meat, which wasn’t an option.

——

She may well have whispered ‘I’ll miss you,’ once I’d gone, but as this is first-person narrative and therefore not omniscient, we just don’t know.

——

I lay, disoriented in the darkness. How long had I been out of it? Hours? Minutes? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? Decades? Centuries? Millennia? Decamilleniums? Megaannums? Ten megaannums (possibly ‘decamegaannum’ or ‘megamegaannum’)? Hell, maybe it was tempus immemorial, I.e. Latin for ‘always’ or ‘beyond the scope of time’? Trying not to panic, I checked my watch. Just over two hours.

——

‘For crying out loud, Roz!’ I yelled. ‘Why do you girls never keep up-to-date batteries in your handbags?’

——

The pain was indescribable, therefore it won’t be described.

——

He drew his former driving instructor’s Beretta 70 revolver, which he’d been given as a prize for passing, from the holster beneath his dressing gown (he’d come out in his pyjamas) and yanked open the Peugeot’s door. Stepping outside the car, careful to avoid a big puddle, Capello stared out into the rainswept darkness.

——

The man pointing the Beretta at Nick’s head moved round slowly to reveal himself (not in that way).

——

‘Eventually, he set off to see where she’d got to, knocked on Strain’s door…then he disappeared, too.’

‘What, right at the door, like David Copperfield?’

‘No, no, he went in. Presumably then something happened to him inside the house, which stopped him coming out again alive, because he was never seen again. It wasn’t a magic trick, or anything like that.’

‘I see. So, almost as if he was murdered, then?’

‘Exactly’

———

‘So finally, it almost adds up,’ Nick said, racing against time to work out precisely what it almost added up to.

———

There was nothing more Nick could do. Bar helping them.
So he ran.

——-

Nick hadn’t felt a shred of remorse his entire life. Unless it was that matter of ousting his wife and child from their family home via a team of bailiffs. But he’d paid the company eventually, hadn’t he?

——-

Nick slammed hard on the accelerator of his Honda Civic and sped out of both Roz’s road and her life, immediately breaking hard to negotiate a cul-de-sac, before roaring back around again, passing Roz’s house a second time and speeding off in the direction he actually needed to go in.

——
He reached into the glove compartment and drew out some extra rounds for his revolver, plus some Murray mints.

——

There was no aroma on earth quite like the smell of a freshly printed paperback, even if ultimately it was the smell of dead trees.

——

Many of these quotes and samples are lifted from pages and pages worth of back and forth and hilarious writing. Those wiper blades may or may not remain an issue and there’s plenty more car battery talk to sink your teeth into in the full book (but not literally, you’ll ruin the genuine foil embossed book cover).

Recommended?: Garth Marenghi is a self proclaimed genius horror master. If you love horror and witty, absurdist comedy, this book will have you in stitches.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Actually 4.5/5

As someone who has wished for a long time that Garth Marenghi's Darkplace got more episodes, this is absolutely the next best thing. Very in keeping with the humour of the TV show, with a thoroughly ridiculous plotline and insane characters.

Of the three stories on this book, I think "The Dark Fractions" was my favourite, because what can beat such incredible concepts as an evil throppelganger, and a psychic dugong whose telepathic voice sounds like Liam Neeson?

Thank you Heather for the present! 💜

[kate vee · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5, whereas Type-Face alone was a 4. The joke really just lasted way too long.

[Ozymandias · Rating 4 out of 5]

Subtext is for Cowards
Garth Marenghi. Author. Dreamweaver. Visionary. Plus actor. Fans of the ludicrously undervalued Darkplace televisual feast have long awaited the unveiling of this fabulist’s next radically visionary project. Garth has been keeping his proverbial cards close to his chest (also proverbial) ever since the cowards that be refused to broadcast his protean vision and delegated it to a brief run in Peru. Now this shocking, radical, visionary author finally has his chance to shine, excel, surpass, outdo his already prescient work. Will his latest work of genius outshine his previous masterpieces of suspense? Does a bear shit in the woods? To be clear, that’s a rhetorical question and neither bears nor woods feature as key elements in the plot. So best you just take that as ‘yes’ and read on. When dealing with such an innovative author the only question it is sensible, nay permissible, to ask is whether this is the greatest book ever written in the English language? Yes, reader, it is. Only Garth Marenghi can ask the deepest questions. Questions that rattle your very soul. Questions that cut right to the heart of our fallen and cynical age. Questions like ‘What do you do when your pact with Satan backfires’? Or ‘How do we fight the vicious scourge of vegetarianism: vigilante justice or euthanasia’? Or ‘Why would anyone be stupid enough to carry non rechargeable batteries’? Penetrating.

Oh yeah, it’s actually a parody of talentless, self-indulgent horror writers.

Parodying bad writing is a difficult task because it requires a delicate balance. Too on the nose and you suffer the tedium that incompetence brings. Too self-aware and the joke dies. Because the joke is always the same: Garth Marenghi is a horrible writer and an equally horrible human who is too stupid and self-absorbed to realize either and so blindly arrogant that he’s convinced all criticism is due to jealousy of his authorial genius. He is, in short, utterly loathsome. And because his head is so far up his own ass he is incapable of writing a protagonist that isn’t a thinly-veiled version of himself: in this case a successful horror writer called Nick Steen. Meaning that this loathsome cretin, whose misogyny, racism, callousness, crudity, stupidity, etc. makes you want to strangle him until the gurgling stops, will always win. All who criticize or question him will end up dead, usually after a long speech of apology detailing why Garth, err… Nick, was right all along. The real villain never faces his comeuppance or realizes the error of his ways. It’s infuriating, even with the running gag that he is literally the monster of the piece as he is responsible for all of the horrors and everything would stop if he was dead. Darkplace handled this desire to see Garth suffer by adding a bevy of behind-the-scenes “interviews” showing what a pathetic failure Garth’s life really is. Here there’s nothing between you and the abyss that is his soul. And that can be hard to handle. No matter how inadvertently funny he is.

The book mostly manages to thread this needle rather effectively. The writing is so bad it is hilarious, uproarious, riotous, laugh-inducing. The prose is so purple it verges on ultraviolet. Garth’s inability to understand metaphor or treat the reader as anything more than an abject moron is consistently amusing (like when he stops in the middle of a suspense scene to repeat the plot in slow, methodical detail). His kneejerk prejudices and cruelty are always a good source of laughs (like when he decides to stop paying alimony for his daughter so he can afford to spend more time creating “visionary” art). His obvious and out of place rants on minor things that annoy him really do make you shake your head (like when he stops in the middle of a life-or-death scenario to lecture his partner on all the ways you can accidentally drain your car’s battery). His idea of an intelligent course of action is so bizarre and irrational that you’re left in a kind of shocked awe (like when he does an elderly horror writer a “favour” by tearing his novel into pieces before him, leaving him paralyzed in a pool of piss on his bathroom floor, thus showing him that he was outdated and should just accept death so that younger more radical talent can replace him). There is no bar so low that he can’t clear it with plenty of air above. All the humour is at his expense. I’ve included some of the best quotes below. They’re gems.

As for the plots, they’re not wholly stupid in theory, just in practice. They’re horror cliches, but cliches work for a reason and in the hands of a good author these stories could work. Garth is obviously not that author, but the result is that the plots aren’t as boring or perplexing as they might be were he to try something genuinely “revolutionary”. For example, the first story is a mix of Faust and the Monkey’s Paw. Because Garth has all the originality of a Michael Bay film, the cursed item is a typewriter. Because Garth has the subtlety of a Fox News pundit, the seductive subtext becomes an uncomfortable erotic fixation on his typewriter. Because Garth has the common sense of a granny transferring her life savings to a Nigerian prince, Nick goes in knowing the typewriter is cursed, deliberately screws over the salesman, and hires a Satanist to renegotiate his contract. In brief, the story beats are so obvious you can hit the snooze alarm and just focus on his god-awful prose and incomprehensible logic.

If the book has a fault it’s that it can sometimes be far cleverer than Garth is. It is hard to write stupid. The conclusion of that typewriter story has Nick in the lair of a demon called the Prolix, whose whole purpose is to ruin Nick’s stories by expanding their wordiness, circumlocution, garrulity, long-windedness, repetition, verbosity. It’s directly calling out his nonexistent writing skills. Garth is far too dim to understand this and too arrogant to recognize it. Yet he is frequently called out for his terrible writing by his editor (she alternates randomly between gross praise and obvious criticism) whose criticisms are genuine in a way that a real Garth would never be able to understand.

But at other times it goes too far in the other direction, letting Garth take control through a deeply uncomfortable and grotesque round of torture porn where he’s literally flayed alive in excruciating detail. The jokes around this are funny, as he experiences zero difficulties running around with shattered bones and no skin on, but neither that nor his outraged whines about how pathetic his publishers are for trying to censor this can make up for the fact that it’s just utterly vile. I’m reminded of A Fish Called Wanda: that film has a scene where Michael Palin’s animal-loving hitman Ken has to murder an elderly witness but keeps killing her dogs instead. The initial screenings included realistic blood and guts and got shocked gasps. Replace that with a comically flattened dog and it’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie. The idea of Garth going all in on torture porn, thinking it makes him edgy and bold, is hilarious. Actually hearing it is just too much.

While I don’t usually take a side in the matter of format (which is largely a question of taste and convenience) you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t listen to this on audio book. Garth Marenghi started off as a performance and Matthew Holness really shines as the pompous narcissist. He reads the lamest of lines with such intense conviction that it’s hard not to laugh. Even better is his obvious confusion where he reads out the table of contents and the copyright page. There are several non-Nick characters that he does as well, and while this too seems an area where we have to compromise with believability it’d be pretty tedious otherwise. Just imagine Garth’s intense and unplaceable regional monotone coming out of every character. The only negative thing I’ll say about it is the aforementioned gruesome excess. In the written book that’s moved into an appendix, where it belongs. It’s easy to skip or skim. In the audio version there’s no real way to do that so you have to listen to it all. For all the amusement of hearing him say “Footnote: or were they!” I wish they’d left that out.

I suspect that most people will know from this description whether they’ll enjoy this or not. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re the type of person who’s amused by bad writing or irrational stupidity this may be a good book for you. Truthfully, I found the first story the weakest (partly because I was turned off by the flaying) but it does pick up once you get onto parts two and three. These stories continue with Nick as the protagonist, but deal with an ongoing arc of fighting the demons he directly unleashed from his imagination. So after the cursed typewriter in the first story we get a mad scientist obsessed with reanimating skeletons (boners) and then all of Nick’s evil alternate personas escape. The latter story actually manages to make the ongoing metajoke of Garth’s unwillingness to listen to sound editorial advice become central without breaking the fourth wall as he struggles to make the narrative description of his “dark fragments” make sense and (because rewriting and editing are for people without talent) he struggles to make clear which fragment is which doing what. It’s funny stuff. I’ve included some highlights below to give you even more of a chance to experience the joys, and perils, of Garth Marenghi’s terrorfying TerrorTome.

So to return to my original question, is it good? Are you really thick enough to ask? That was also rhetorical. I just said it was. So go out and buy a copy already. Or two. Three if you’re particularly careless. But four’s right out.

.

She may well have whispered, ‘I’ll miss you,’ once I’d gone, but I couldn’t hear that from where I was, and as this is first-person narration and therefore not omniscient, we just won’t know.

‘Roz, I need you to do this,’ I said, although I didn’t, in actual fact – that’s just a lazy phrase which helps steer a lost narrative back on course when readers are giving up in droves, and is, ironically, a major sign of bad writing. But I knew Roz would have encountered that a lot in her career as editor of books by authors other than me, and would no doubt have employed it herself to fix failing narratives in desperate situations, and thus I used it here to snap her attention back from her own internal abyss.

It was a strange sound, she decided – not quite earthbound, if she had to put a label on it. Which she didn’t. But did anyway. A sound like a walking pile of twigs, or a loosened bag of discarded rubble that had somehow suddenly developed the ability to move.

‘Thanks, Nick.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘I already have.’
‘Then don’t mention it again.’
‘I won’t. I promise.’

‘A legion of Boners, who will rise upwards, forcing Mankind to do its bidding. Thrusting it deep into a titanic struggle for its very survival. Yes, soon my Boners will stand proud, hardened against the withering, wilted flock of flaccid prannies you call Humans. Against you, my Boners will rise, their spirits stiffened within, and at my command, they will plunge themselves into all who oppose them.’
Nick grinned wryly at Strain’s choice of words. The kid’s development must have been severely arrested. No one called humans ‘prannies’ these days.

‘Good job I loaded this with silver bullets from that box of silver bullets that was sitting on that table labelled “Silver Bullets” inside the “Silver Bullet’’ room I just entered.

Something else was troubling her, too. Dr Nelson Strain . . . That name was familiar. Hadn’t Nick written a book about someone called Strain? Yes, now that she thought of it, Nelson Strain was one of Nick’s early characters, wasn’t he? A crazed serial killer obsessed with the effects of avascular necrosis on compressed human bones! It was all coming back to her now. Nick had ditched the sequel on her advice, after a flood of complaints from a shocked and morally outraged bone doctor whom Nick had publicly castigated for failing to alleviate his writer’s cramp. God, could it be true, then? Was this the latest of Nick’s chillers to have come to terrifying life around them? Had she stumbled, unknowingly, into an as-yet-unwritten horror novel of Nick’s own subconscious making? One in which she alone was its helpless and unsuspecting victim?
Yes, is the answer.

Capello looked up at Nick, his face wet with flowing tears, which were now starting to flow even more fully, though not heavily enough to constitute a fully blown bawl. A tastefully vulnerable volume of tears that still smacked heavily of innate masculinity.

‘The very same. But she never returned. Dwayne waited and waited, but always heard nothing. Eventually, he set off to see where she’d got to, knocked on Strain’s door . . . then he disappeared, too.’
‘What, right there at the door, like David Copperfield?’
‘No, no, he went in. Presumably then something happened to him inside the house, which stopped him coming out again alive, because he was never seen again. It wasn’t a magic trick, or anything like that.’
‘I see. So, almost as if he was murdered, then?’
‘Exactly,’ said Capello, fresh tears starting to flow.

I quickly did the math. Despite my fame, I knew I’d be unable to claim ancient antiquities against tax (I’ve tried several times, but no joy), meaning I’d need to make my savings elsewhere. If I ceased all alimony payments and sent my ex-wife to live in rented accommodation at her own expense, selling all my daughter’s non-transportable toys, I might just be able to afford it without dipping into any of my own money.
Given that Jacinta had yet to forgive me for press-ganging our daughter into an early proofreading career, it would hardly come as a surprise to her if I suddenly recommenced hostilities out of the blue. And I wouldn’t need to worry about any legal challenge, either. Early on in my career, I’d refused to co-write anything with another human being, including my marriage certificate, for which I’d employed several pseudonyms. So any potential ex-wife would need to descend all nine Circles of Hell in order to extract a single penny from my mounting fortunes. And, if this typewriter really was the one I’d been seeking, those fortunes would soon be mounting even higher.

‘It’s like the 25,000-word novellas I used to write. Or short novels, which is the term I prefer. No room or time in those tomes for any extraneous info or vague, supporting subplots. They have to keep the story moving at all costs, as do we in this bizarre world of my unfolding tales we now find ourselves caught up in. And to continue the analogy, my innate ability to circumnavigate conventional “plot” elements we are now metaphorically facing, via the quick and sure-fire method of relating expositional elements through the logical and well-foreshadowed device of plausible prior knowledge, is certainly a bonus to us here, if not a positive boon, and we shouldn’t lose sight of that amid all the attendant horror. Watch your step.’

[Andy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I watched Garth Marenghi's Darkplace when it first came out and always felt I'd discovered something secret and wonderful. So few people saw it back then. When I heard the Dreamweaver himself had written a book? How could I not? And how could you not go for the audiobook, narrated by Garth himself?

If you like Darkplace, you know what you're going to get. And you will get it. And more of it. And more. The humour works on so many levels and reaches a form of genius and it genuinely pushes some limits in the horror genre (immediately deflated by asides and arguments about editing). It's great, but it's also just a little too long, ultimately overstaying its welcome.

Ostensibly a connected series of 3 novellas, the first Type-Face is the best and it works on many many levels, but there are joys throughout. Not least (and perhaps the funniest) is the final 'chapter' where Garth reads out the copyright information. I'm assuming this was just for the audiobook but his reading of this is brilliantly funny.

Something for the fans or those intrigued and happy to be very confused.

[Spencer · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fan of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace I had to read this, and thankfully it lived up to my expectations, it’s ridiculous, cliched, over-the-top, misogynist and self-centered – in other words brilliant! It’s just as good as the tv show and I frequently found myself laughing out loud, it’s everything a fan of Garth Marenghi could want and I’d highly recommend it.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

More terrifying than an army of unhinged Boners, more sensual than a pair of glistening man-breasts, and more mysterious than a dugong. TerrorTome is quite possibly the best novel ever written, probably; I've not read them all.

Beware before partaking in these twisted delights, travelers, and don't forget to bring a change of shorts.

[Erin Crane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Loved the Garth Marenghi show, but it didn’t translate to book form effectively for me. I found myself bored and skimming a lot. I bet listening to the audiobook would have improved things, but my library didn’t have it!

I will say the frequency of “Hell, …” and “…, dammit.” did entertain me.

[Darren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really need to rewatch "Dark Place" now