When is a show not a show? When it’s a book tour, of course. Time was when book tours were a thing authors did in thinly populated branches of Waterstones. These days, at least when comedians are involved, they’re often significant productions in themselves, and – perhaps – a means for lacking-match-fitness performers to edge back towards the live stage. It would be lush to think this outing for the “horror writer and visionary doomscribe” Garth Marenghi, here to promote his new novel TerrorTome, might foretell a full stage return for the man behind Channel 4’s Darkplace. It is unlikely though: his literary commitments are all-consuming. TerrorTome, he tells us, is “volume one of potentially a thousand volumes”.
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. 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. To be fair, TerrorTome is identifiably in the same tone of voice (the words pompous and preposterous; the vowels boringly flattened) that animated the man’s fondly remembered stage work, which – while more theatrically expansive – was always narrated by this McGonagall of horror, whose every baroque phrase tends towards a bathetic clunk.
Back then, with first Fright Knight and then Netherhead – and Darkplace, in due course – Holness wasn’t alone, but working with an estimable gathering of stage talent. (This was a theatre as much as a comedy phenomenon.) Richard Ayoade, of course. Alice Lowe, too often overlooked when female winners of the Edinburgh comedy award are totted up. Paul King, who went on to direct the Paddington movies, among other accomplishments. Collectively, they put (torn and bloody) flesh on the bones of Marenghi’s leaden prose, and added duff, dopey theatricality to the duff, dopey writing that formed the show’s raw material.
Occasionally, we miss that level of stagecraft here. Holness/Marenghi has not recruited an MC for the Q&A: “I don’t believe in paying people to interview me.” He does it himself for a bit, in dialogue with his own pre-recorded voice on a crappy tape recorder (a prop that does heavy comic lifting throughout the show). Then an audience member is recruited to the role. Which is fine: Holness is sharp, and his conception of the character so involved, that this discussion section can’t help but be amusing. (Your advice for writer’s block, Mr Marenghi? “Write through it.”) But Marenghi is also brusque and dismissive, which makes for a stop-start discussion. A better moderator might have helped it fly. Dean Learner, perhaps? Alas, “Dean is serving time.”
But I’m nit-picking. Judge the TerrorTome book tour for what it is, and it’s great fun. The character’s mythology is so rich now, it’s a performance in itself – I particularly enjoyed the inventory of titles with which he recalls his period as a specialist in skin-disease horror. And the clash between Marenghi’s self-seriousness and the crumminess of the prose is a gift that keeps on giving.
Tonight’s readings recount fictional horror writer Nick Steen’s adventures with a cursed typewriter, with which he develops a torrid if improbable sexual relationship. 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. One marvels at Marenghi’s tangled sexual subconscious, which would confound the doughtiest shrink – assuming anyone could be found to take on the job. Little doubt that TerrorTome is the Christmas present you need for that horror-loving – or comedy-loving – person in your life. And in the meantime, dreams (or should that be nightmares?) of a full Marenghi revival, all collaborators intact, must wait.
