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. You can jump right in and enjoy a cheesy, overblown, po-faced horror parody that trips over the tropes repeatedly to humorous effect. Unless it was that matter of ousting his wife and child from their family home via a team of bailiffs.

Eventually, he set off to see where she’d got to, knocked on Strain’s door…then he disappeared, too. 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). 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. A sound like a walking pile of twigs, or a loosened bag of discarded rubble that had somehow suddenly developed the ability to move. 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.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? 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. Matthew Holness has ruined all books for me because now all I want to read is everything in the style of Garth’s writing.

Horrormeister Garth Marenghi makes a triumphant comeback with three linked tales of shuddersome, mind-bending fear .

Garth Marenghi started off as a performance and Matthew Holness really shines as the pompous narcissist. 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.

Mayhap, the Dark Forces of the Nether Pit conspired to send this worthy volume to my trembling meat-clamps. Photograph: Simon Webb/The Guardian View image in fullscreen His dark materials … Matthew Holness as Garth Marenghi. 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). Legend has it that there was an earlier text (legend is correct, btw); one that contained a story so horrid, so gruesome, that Hodder's initial printing was marked 'To be Pulped' and the manuscript subsequently revised to appeal to a weaker-minded and, frankly, staggeringly ill-informed general public.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! Now to rewatch Dark Place and delve back into some of the pulp novels from whence this was conceived. The legend, the master, the man - Marenghi is sure to deliver chills that will scare you to your bone jelly. I initially struggled to find the sweet spot of the rhythm to his writing style which is hand-in-glove with the sardonic, sarcastic, at-times-puerile, clever humour utilised almost constantly. 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.

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). In my head, I was playing out developments as if part of a series of ‘Darkplace’, which made me smile a lot. 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 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.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. 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”. I got the audio book read by Garth himself, and I am glad I own it, as his pompous attitude reflects perfectly with the main character.