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.
