Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome: Dreamweaver, Doomsage, Sunday Times bestseller

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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. 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! To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Unless it was that matter of ousting his wife and child from their family home via a team of bailiffs.

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?Photograph: Simon Webb/The Guardian View image in fullscreen His dark materials … Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi. Though it should be said that the hardback (quite poorly typeset and copy-edited too) isn't much more than a souvenir, seeing as the audiobook is for surely the canonical version. He reached into the glove compartment and drew out some extra rounds for his revolver, plus some Murray mints. 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? Horrormeister Garth Marenghi makes a triumphant comeback with three linked tales of shuddersome, mind-bending fear .

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. Garth Marenghi started off as a performance and Matthew Holness really shines as the pompous narcissist.The mercurial horror maestro and star of Darkplace delivers a trio of blood curdling tales from his long-lost opus in this side-splittingly spot-on parody of grisly supernatural blockbusters ― Waterstones --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition. 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. 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. Admittedly, some of the descriptive passages felt tedious at times, but they support the hooks and the comebacks to a lot of ongoing jokes, as well as keeping the main characters present in your mind’s eye.

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. And the clash between Marenghi’s self-seriousness and the crumminess of the prose is a gift that keeps on giving. I do hope there is more to come the parody of the golden age of horror novels it both ridiculous and completely believable. 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”.Words ,sentences and even letters that were formally thought by my brain and given life by my mouth now were usurped by part mysterious force, part sinister force. Still, it's easy reading and the first section at least is a minor masterpiece of ludicrous pastiche.

But Matthew Holness, the man behind the mask, stayed true to billing, with a first half of excerpts from the book, and a second half taking questions from his assembled fans. I caught Marenghi’s book tour on its London leg, nursing a hope there might be more to the promised literary recital than met the eye. 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.These stories continue with Nick as the protagonist, but deal with an ongoing arc of fighting the demons he directly unleashed from his imagination. 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.