Twelfth Post!

[hoisinsauce]

POST NAMER TBC-- work harder, meme!

Welcome back, anyway! Chat fandom, media, creative things, weirdness from around the net, funny stuff, anything! Meme awaits!

(start a comment thread by replying to this post)

 

Comments

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Failing to read; decided to try something more intellectual.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

So far it's funny every so often, but not that funny. It's mostly a guy having violent sex with a cursed typewriter. It's funnier if you imagine it being read by Garth, but still not *that* funny.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Chapter 6. More typewriter sex. It's not funny. I am bored.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

He gets flayed, has his spine broken in two, then runs away. This bit is slightly funny. I laughed at him taking 10 minutes to put batteries in a torch.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Finished pt 1. Too fucking long, not funny enough. I think the "horrotica" section on pg 289 is funny, so recommend that anyone who's curious about this and picks it up in a shop or library just reads that. It'll give you the vibe of the book without all the boring stuff.

There are 3 parts in total, but idk if I can be bothered. It doesn't take very long to read, but it feels like wasted time. With a lot of fictional bodily fluids.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

(I considered buying this, but was concerned it would be gimmicky; am glad I didn't buy it and am borrowing someone else's copy. I think maybe Holness has got so caught up in how silly the scenario is, he doesn't get how dull it reads, especially to an audience that's seen equally silly stuff (but written in more entertaining ways) in fandom. "Man having sex with cursed demonic typewriter" isn't even groundbreakingly bad as an idea. Dude needs to read more orange/roomba and see how it's done.)

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Onto part 2: Bride of Bone. This is better than the last, so far, and he should've started the book here. It opens with an ex-talk-therapist who has decided that talk-therapy doesn't work. In the middle of a dark and stormy night, he's investigating a "lunatic asylum" where the "inmates" have escaped; he's in pursuit of a particularly insane one, and spends his time describing the others like zombies and shooting them because he thinks they need less talk-therapy and more action-therapy. Also there's a living skeleton. There's a paragraph-long summary of the first story, "Typeface", that's funnier than the actual story; he should've just kept it at that.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

(the asylum is described exactly like a hollywood-film prison, with watchtowers and dogs patrolling the wards)

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Making another stab at this. Haven't got any further since I last posted.

Gonna make a hot drink and IT'S ON.

Really hoping story 2 continues to be less shit than the first.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Read a few more chapters. This part continues to be much more fun than the last. Characters continue to operate under the assumption that, if a person is mad, that person needs to be shot, so they fear going mad, lest their allies be forced to shoot them. The lunatic asylum (of the writer-protagonist's imagination) is described as having a bounty program for "bringing in crazies", with a special bonus for anyone bringing in more than one in a night.

The pacing is much better in this one. It's all still thoroughly stupid, but much better-plotted. The Lone Female Character wakes up, kidnapped! Her toe has been amputated! She blacks out from shock. She wakes up again, ten minutes later. All her other toes have been amputated!

Also liked how a werewolf casually showed up and the protagonist noted he would deal with it tomorrow.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Finished Bride of Bone. Much better than first one. These defo work best read aloud in Marenghi's voice (and a shit fake Italian accent, ad required), to a reluctant audience.

Still not as funny as it should be, but it's okay.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

*as required

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, this made me laugh (spoilers!):

https://ibb.co/2YdFQS85

He talks with Bruford for several pages before it casually mentions that Bruford is a psychic dugong.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

It's a bit weird how many niche motifs this book pinches from the IT Crowd, btw. We've got plotpoints involving women getting their feet comically mangled by shoes, and aquarium-destruction. It's weird how it's not acknowledged anywhere, when it's so glaring, and really can't be a coincidence, given Ayoade got his role in the IT Crowd after Linehan saw him in Darkplace and loved it. Maybe it's meant to be meta about how Marenghi is just lifting stuff from TV.

Re: Books - Terrortome ("Garth Marenghi")

[(Anonymous)]

Finished this garbage!

Bride of Bone was the best of the 3. I made it through the book by reading aloud in Garth voice, but it was still a struggle. There was one detail I liked, which was that the author tried to show a character was evil by giving him a motorbike, a big moustache, and a habit of setting bottles of bourbon on fire before drinking them. Beyond that... too many words for too few laughs.