Dreamweaver Garth Marenghi is finally releasing a book we can actually read

Although visionary author and Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace star Garth Marenghi has written more than 400 books at this point—significantly more, as he’s often proudly noted, than he’s ever read—a depressingly small number of them are currently available to readers to actually go out and acquire. Zero, in fact. (Whither Slicer, Slasher, or Afterbirth, the book about a mutated placenta that attacks Bristol?) Like we said: Depressing.

But that’s all about to change, as the Darkplace dreamweaver (and British comedian, writer, and director Matthew Holness, who created both the character of hack horror god Marenghi, and the stage shows and short-lived TV series on which he was most prominently featured) has announced a new book that you can actually, really buy: TerrorTome, due out on November 10. (As Marenghi himself notes in a video announcing the news, it was meant to be out before Halloween, but he got into a fight with the editor.)

Pre-orders for the book are already open, and, from the description and excerpts on its publisher’s page, it promises to be exactly what we might hope for from Marenghi/Holness—which is to say that it reads like a very silly, very cutting parody of the worst excesses of ’90s literary horror, including plot elements like a horror writer who gets sucked into his own typewriter and must thus “defend the town of Stalkford from his own fictional horrors, including avascular-necrosis-obsessed serial killer Nelson Strain and Nick’s dreaded throppleganger, the Dark Third.”

Holness has actually mostly been working in actual horror in recent years; in 2018, he wrote and directed his first film, Possum, a critically lauded horror film based on his own short story of the same name.

Terror Tome will be available in hardcover, e-book, and audiobook format. (Audiobook! Be still our hearts!) The 304-page book promises “three spine-shattering tales of fright.”

[via Fangoria]