e. Steen's own mind), then battles a maniacal serial killer with a gruesome obsession for human bones, and finally is forced to confront a host of his own nefarious doppelgangers. He wrote, directed and starred in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace for the Peruvian market, which subsequently aired on Channel 4 and has not been repeated due to its radical and polemic content. Twitter turned me onto Garth Marenghi's Darkplace just a matter of weeks before I saw this book announced.

Hand-signed by the Archduke of Darkdom himself, this collector's edition features an exclusive new short story, 'Throttle and Bribes'. The audiobook seems the ideal way to experience it, with Marenghi’s - shall we say - unique style of acting to enhance the grisly details. The first story, Typeface is a very literal explication of the potentially masturbatory nature of writing. 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. These man-on-keyboard erotic encounters are purple and blue in equal measure; so too the saucy goings-on with Nick’s agent Roz (“she rode me like a butcher’s cutting machine”) in the final excerpt.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. It’s a pretty tricky thing to describe, so I’ve picked out some of my personal laugh out loud moments. Beautifully bonkers, with a razor-sharp understanding of the genre, Garth Marenghi's prose is schlocky, corny, cliché-ridden and over-written. 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.

Reads like Garth's classic oeuvre of paperback horrors crossed with the X-Files, Faustian myth and bits of Manimal. The explicit descriptions of torture and pain didn't work for me--don't get me wrong, I don't mind explicit descriptions like that, but it was out of kilter with what I was expecting. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. While I don’t usually take a side in the matter of format (which is largely a question of taste and convenience) you’d be doing yourself a disservice if you didn’t listen to this on audio book. Capello looked up at Nick, his face wet with flowing tears, which were now starting to flow even more fully, though not heavily enough to constitute a fully blown bawl.They have to keep the story moving at all costs, as do we in this bizarre world of my unfolding tales we now find ourselves caught up in. Reads like Garth’s classic oeuvre of paperback horrors crossed with the X-Files, Faustian myth and bits of Manimal. 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. She may well have whispered ‘I’ll miss you,’ once I’d gone, but as this is first-person narrative and therefore not omniscient, we just don’t know. He wrote, directed and starred in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace for the Peruvian market, which subsequently aired on Channel 4 and has not been repeated due to its radical and polemic content.