How did I miss this? Seriously, back in early-mid March, I was randomly looking online for horror novels and was astonished to find that there are actual Garth Marenghi books these days 🙂
If you haven’t heard of Garth Marenghi before, he’s a parody of 1980s horror authors (created, written and played by Matthew Holness) who was most famous for the 2004 comedy-horror TV show “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace“.
Unfortunately, greedy collectors and resellers had jacked the price of second-hand copies of Marenghi’s ” The Oeuvre” (Warning – flickering candles) to comically extortionate levels unseen since the infamous hyper-inflation of Weimar Germany. Luckily though, “Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome” (2022) was actually available at a sensible second-hand price online 🙂
So, let’s take a look at it. This review may contain SPOILERS.
This is the 2023 Coronet (UK) paperback edition of “Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome” (2022) that I read.
Structured more like a collection of three connected novellas, the “TerrorTome” follows badass horror author Nick Steen. After an ill-advised romantic relationship with a cursed typewriter, all of the many horrors within his imagination take physical form to torment the local town of Stalkford. It is up to Nick – and sometimes his editor Roz Bloom, but mostly Nick – to defeat these evil waking nightmares!
One of the first things that I will say about this novel is that, even though it can get a bit too ridiculous at times, it is still a masterpiece of comedy-horror. This was a novel which literally made me laugh aloud on repeated occasions. Yes, it is at it’s funniest if you already know about the Garth Marenghi character and if you’re a fan of British humour and 1980s horror media. But if, like me, you fit into all three of this categories, then this is one of the funniest novels you’ll ever read 🙂
There are just too many types of humour to list here. The best way I can describe the “TerrorTome” is that it’s intentionally “so bad that it’s good”. Not just the ludicrous “Mary Sue” protagonist, but also Marenghi’s entire writing style and personality as well. In the classic British comedy tradition, he’s a deliberately unlikeable character who is meant to be laughed at – his writing is shoddy, he has a ridiculously over-inflated sense of himself, he’s more than a little bit cynical, he’s fairly conservative (in a “time-traveller from the 1980s” sort of way), he makes all sorts of hilarious errors, he’s terrible at writing women or older people, there are random asides/footnotes, he over-explains things etc… And it is hilariously funny!
Not only that, each of the three parts of the “TerrorTome” is also a parody of a different piece of 1980s horror media. The first part is a parody of “Hellraiser” (1987), the second part is a parody of “Re-Animator” (1985) and the third part is a parody of Stephen King’s “The Dark Half” (1989).
Personally, my favourite of the three is the second one – which begins with some of the best dark comedy sequences of the entire book, whether it is the “heroic” psychiatrist Cliff Capello (another “Mary Sue” character) gleefully treating escaped mental patients as if they were zombies, or Nick Steen “heroically” defeating a large herbivorous monster with a flamethrower.
Yes, as hinted earlier, each one of the three stories in this book eventually escalates to the point of becoming too ridiculous, and they are definitely funnier at the beginning than at the end. Even so, this is still an incredibly funny piece of comedy-horror fiction. Not only are there “deleted scenes” and “book club questions” at the end, but the sheer number of random British references, hilariously badly-worded sentences and stuff like that all add up to a completely unique, and – if it’s your sense of humour – laugh out loud novel. And, surprisingly, “Darkplace” is only referenced once (complete with a “Heh heh heh.” footnote attached to it).
Plus, like actual 1980s horror novels, the writing also has more complexity to it than you might think. And, yes, this is one of the novel’s many running jokes – specifically how Marenghi will often use three synonyms for whatever he is describing, the hilarious long-windedness of some moments etc… If you have experience with reading older horror novels, you’ll easily be able to breeze through all of this with a combination of nostalgia and laughter. But, if you’re used to modern novels, I can see why some parts might seem “difficult” or “slow”.
Another hilariously weird thing about this novel is the perspective. The first part is written from a first-person perspective and the rest of the book is written in third-person. Yet, surprisingly, this actually sort of works. And Garth Marenghi’s character comes across perfectly in literally every story. You can tell that it was written by him just by the unnatural or stilted way that some of the characters react and stuff like that. It’s difficult to describe, but it adds an extra layer of meta-humour to the entire book.
As for length, with the bonus stuff, it’s a sensibly efficient 296 pages in length. The breaks between each of the three stories also help to stop the “too ridiculous” parts from going on for too long as well. And, although I don’t listen to audiobooks, I listened to the sample for this book on Amazon and was delighted to hear that Matthew Holness actually reads it in-character as Garth Marenghi. Yes, this is easy enough to imagine if you’ve seen him on TV but I imagine that some moments are probably even funnier when you hear him aloud.
All in all, if you’re a fan of Garth Marenghi, 1980s horror media and/or British humour in general, then you have to read this book! It’s hilarious! Yes, each story gets a bit too ridiculous by the end, but this is still one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read.
If I had to give it a rating out of five, it would get four and a half.
