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. In the show it works, but while I thought 3 short stories would be a breeze to get through, it verges on exhausting/painful with just a few funny moments and while this maybe to show how bad an author the character Marenghi is, the plot was hard to follow at times, that or I just mentally timed out.

The humour is always grounded in the absurdity of both the story itself and egomaniacal nature of the persona writing it. Reading this book turned my stomach upside down so I quickly read it again , which luckily left it the right way up, but a third or any odd amount of times would be a great discomfort. Eventually, he set off to see where she’d got to, knocked on Strain’s door…then he disappeared, too. I initially struggled to find the sweet spot of the rhythm to his writing style which is hand-in-glove with the sardonic, sarcastic, at-times-puerile, clever humour utilised almost constantly. In brief, the story beats are so obvious you can hit the snooze alarm and just focus on his god-awful prose and incomprehensible logic.For years, our humble fabulist has given us such shudderwork as 'Afterbirth', in which a mutated placenta attacks Bristol.

The second and third segments are somewhat closer to actual stories with surreal, farcical metafictional overlays that mostly work, but I think they suffer from the overall superiority of the first bit. Now to rewatch Dark Place and delve back into some of the pulp novels from whence this was conceived. The funny-crappiness of Marenghi is a lot less fun when you actually have to read it rather than laugh at it.Even better is his obvious confusion where he reads out the table of contents and the copyright page.

My review may be slightly biased as I am a massive fan of the original Gareth Marenghi's Darkplace television show. 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. The final scenario with its recursive dark alter egos really left me wanting more and I really hope this is not the last we see of this fictional dark genius.And the clash between Marenghi’s self-seriousness and the crumminess of the prose is a gift that keeps on giving. So when the TV concept is replicated for a pulp paper-back horror some 18 years later, it was an unexpected but very welcomed surprise! Good job I loaded this with silver bullets from that box of silver bullets that was sitting on that table labelled “Silver Bullets” inside the “Silver Bullet’’ room I just entered.

I love the show so I was excited to read this but the jokes got old real quick, especially anything to do with Roz and how useless women are. His obvious and out of place rants on minor things that annoy him really do make you shake your head (like when he stops in the middle of a life-or-death scenario to lecture his partner on all the ways you can accidentally drain your car’s battery). The audiobook seems the ideal way to experience it, with Marenghi’s - shall we say - unique style of acting to enhance the grisly details. Ostensibly a connected series of 3 novellas, the first Type-Face is the best and it works on many many levels, but there are joys throughout.Unless it was that matter of ousting his wife and child from their family home via a team of bailiffs. I genuinely enjoyed the scenarios and the writing was consistently amusing without being too clever for its own good.