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Garth Marenghi: Garth Marenghi's TerrorTome (2022, Hodder & Stoughton) 4 stars

When horror writer Nick Steen gets sucked into a cursed typewriter by the terrifying Type-Face, …

Gimmicky, a bit repetitive, but sometimes real fun.

3 stars

If you enjoyed Garth Margenghi's Darkplace, the odds are that you'll like this as well. There are times the joke grows thin, but there are also some really well written and truly clever parts in this horror parody. Matthew Holness knows how to write, and somehow he makes Garth Marenghi - the fictional horror writer writing a poorly camouflaged self-insert in a series of horror novellas riffing on horror writing - an almost believable character. Marenghi comes across as a at times brilliant idiot savant (granted, less the savant, more the idiot most of the time), his writing a sort of outsider art, mainly dross, but occasionally high prose. Especially some of the parts where he weaves into Lovecraftian prose shines, but other parts are flat out bad (the end of the Third Half). But it is hard to judge such meta-literature - because I have no problems believing this is how Marenghi would write.

In sum; some good parts, some bad, some laugh out loud. It was entertaining, but the Terrortome could have - some what ironically - profited from some tighter editing. But that is also a part of the meta joke.