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Hodder snares cult character Garth Marenghi’s ‘petrifying’ tales
Hodder has signed a collection of three stories entitled Terrortome by Garth Marenghi, the fictional horror author played by writer and director Matthew Holness.
Publisher Myfanwy Moore bought world rights to the three dark tales from agent Matthew Turner at RCW, for publication on 10th November 2022. The character is best known for the cult Channel 4 comedy series “Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place”.
The publisher’s synopsis reads: “When horror writer Nick Steen gets sucked into a cursed typewriter by the terrifying Type-Face, Dark Lord of the Prolix, the hellish visions inside his head are unleashed for real. Forced to fight his escaping imagination – now leaking out of his own brain – Nick must 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. Can he and Roz, his frequently incorrect female editor, hunt down these incarnate denizens of Nick’s rampaging imaginata before they destroy Stalkford, outer Stalkford and possibly slightly further?
“From the twisted genius of horror master Garth Marenghi come three dark tales from his long-lost multi-volume epic: TerrorTome.”
Marenghi said: "These three dark tales (which incidentally form a mere chunk of a much larger, denser horror epic I have been penning intermittently over the last three decades and which should absolutely have been published in its entirety, despite the ‘environmental costs’) take Nick and Roz into the dark and unimaginable terrors of a horror writer’s unleashed imagination (thus becoming imaginable and therefore doubly horrific).
“Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome will read like my classic oeuvre of paperback horrors crossed with the ’X-Files’, Faustian myth and bits of ’Manimal’. Plus the cover is embossed with genuine foil at my insistence and at your expense.”
Holness is the author of many short stories for horror anthologies, and has written and directed several films, including the horror feature “Possum”.
