Those without the literary cojones to muddle through one of the scribe's 2,000-page frighteners are probably most familiar with him via his 1980's television program, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which starred Marenghi himself as doctor/paranormalist/man-of-action Rick Dagless, M.D. The series was a little too strong-brew for Britain's Channel 4, hence it sitting on the shelf for some twenty years before the times finally caught up with its visionary medley of shock, awe, and homicidal eyeballs.
Unbelievably, when Darkplace finally emerged from its misty chrysalis in 2004, some critics dismissed it as a load of incompetent rubbish and occasionally felt moved to note certain similarities between Marenghi and comedian Matthew Holness. But those critics are idiots. I position myself as their shadow self, that rare critic in the know who rejects certain flimsy conspiracy theories (i.e., Holness and Marenghi are one and the same) and embraces the good ones (extraterrestrial broccoli will cause the next global pandemic, as foretold in the Darkplace episode "The Creeping Moss from the Shores of Shuggoth").
Marenghi continues to raise the veil between the temporal world and the nether-zone with his latest masterpiece. TerrorTome weaves the tale of ace horror writer Nick Steen, whose fecund imagination is so utterly explosive that its brainchildren begin to take corporeal form off the printed page (i.e., his fictional characters come to life). But you have to get about a third of the way through TerrorTome to get to that bit. Because the first-third mostly deals with Steen's erotic struggle with a demonic, sentient—nay, sexualent (to coin a term, which we critics have license to do, I'm told)—typewriter. And then there's also a third part.
For you see, TerrorTome doesn't just blow the doors off of the horror novel from a storytelling standpoint (which it does), but it also blows the very doors off of the very structure of the novel, period. For you also see, TerrorTome is three novels in one: "Type-Face" (in which Steen does all that stuff with the typewriter), "Bride of Bone" (in which Steen battles the nightmarish products of his own imagination, plus a skeleton army), and "Dark Fractions" (in which Steen divides into several malevolent portions in a plot that is probably sufficiently dissimilar to Stephen King's The Dark Half to skirt vulnerability to most legal actions). Perhaps these three parts are actually novellas, since each one is only about 100-pages long. You read that right: a Garth Marenghi epic that comes in at a very tidy 300-pages, total. The doors continue to blow.
TerrorTome will not be for everyone. Some critics might trivialize it as "hilarious" or "a spot-on parody of labored horror writing" or "good." But those critics are idiots. Readers who prefer the comfort of the familiar, the everyday, the commonplace, the quotidian, will find this magnum opus to be a whole lotta too-much for their garden-variety intellects. But for Marenghi's fellow travelers in the unusual, the unnormal, the para-fantastic, I say, climb aboard, but be prepared for your very concept of what is and is not real to rend like so much moist Charmin.
You've been warned.
