to not read This Bursted Earth is to live a life of quiet, un-burst normalcy. It is to stare at the sky and see only stars, blind to the terrifying, non-Catherine-wheel-related truth. It is to walk through a world ignorant of the Black Steeple and the moustachioed skeleton that hangs over us all, waiting to burst.

The earth, according to Garth Marenghi, has been bursted. Our funny bones, however, have been thoroughly and brilliantly tickled.

A Review of Garth Marenghi’s This Bursted Earth: The Apocalypse Has Never Been So Absurdly Earnest

Let’s be clear. Reviewing a Garth Marenghi novel is not like reviewing other books. It’s less literary criticism and more a geological survey of a newly formed, and slightly concerning, landscape. The ground is unsteady, the logic is porous, and you’re fairly certain you just saw a sentence give birth to a two-headed plot point. With This Bursted Earth, the concluding volume of his trilogy that began with TerrorTome, Marenghi doesn’t just push the envelope of pulp horror. He bursts it, mails the shredded confetti to a cursed mailbox, and then has a giant, moustachioed skeleton deliver the return receipt.

For the uninitiated, Garth Marenghi is the self-proclaimed “Dreamweaver” and “Visionary” behind the cult classic Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, and his literary return has been a thing of beautiful, bewildering chaos. This Bursted Earth is the culmination of this chaos, and to read it is to witness a master at the peak of his… well, let’s call it his power.

The Plot, or, As Marenghi Might Put It, The Inevitable Prophecy of Pre-Destined Doom

Our hero, the ruggedly tormented author Nick Steen (a man so clearly a stand-in for Marenghi it’s a wonder he doesn’t occasionally stop to sign his own autograph within the narrative), is back and his psyche is… leaking. Having previously battled his own internal demon, the entity known as The Printer, Steen is now plagued by visions of a sinister Black Steeple, eerie non-Catherine-wheel lights in the sky, and a giant skeleton with a moustache. Because why have a regular-sized, clean-shaven skeleton when you can have one that looks like it managed a Victorian accounting firm in a previous life?

These are not mere nightmares. They are, as the book’s blurb thrillingly and unsubtly informs us, “portents of a terror yet to come.” Nick Steen’s imagination, a place Marenghi describes with the clinical precision of a man diagnosing a faulty carburettor, is threatening to burst forth from his cranium and take the entire town of Stalkford with it. The central question of the novel is thus not a matter of if the earth will be bursted, but how bursted it will become, and whether anyone can stop it before it becomes too bursted to function.

It’s a high-concept premise that Marenghi tackles with the linguistic finesse of a man trying to describe a neutron star using only a thesaurus from 1983 and a deep, abiding suspicion of subtext. As he himself has famously stated, “I know writers who use subtext, and they’all cowards.” This novel is the glorious, unwavering proof of that philosophy.

A Triumph of Tone: So Bad, It’s Genius (Or Is It So Genius, It’s Bad?)

The genius of Marenghi’s writing, and the source of most of the jokes, is its unwavering, stone-faced commitment to its own ridiculousness. The prose is so densely packed with mixed metaphors, malapropisms, and clichés that it achieves a kind of gravitational pull.

Marenghi doesn’t write characters; he writes archetypes that have been left out in the rain and have rusted into fascinating new shapes. He doesn’t craft dialogue; he forges pronouncements. When a character says, “The air tasted of electricity and forgotten promises,” you don’t question it. You simply accept that in Stalkford, the weather forecast includes a 70% chance of existential regret.

The Grand Finale (Probably)

Billed as the final part of the trilogy, This Bursted Earth promises a “grand finale,” though Marenghi, in his magnanimity, has apparently left “a sliver of potential for further sequels.” The promotional material notes, with chilling finality, that this will “ultimately be my decision.” One imagines Marenghi’s publisher huddled in a boardroom, desperately hoping the decision is based on sales figures and not on whether he has a vision of a new and even more troubling skeletal facial hair configuration.

The meta-narrative, a hallmark of the series, reaches its zenith here. The line between Nick Steen and his creator becomes so blurred it’s practically a smudge on the lens of reality. The book teasingly asks: Is all that we see or seem merely a dream within an Earth that’s been bursted? Marenghi, of course, knows the answer, but revealing it would be, as previously established, an act of cowardice.

The Verdict: To Burst, or Not to Burst?

So, what is the final judgment on Garth Marenghi’s This Bursted Earth for those of us who are not its author?

It is a masterpiece of its kind. A staggering achievement in sustained comedic tone and a love letter to the lurid pulp paperbacks of a bygone era. It is the literary equivalent of a B-movie that is so perfectly, authentically bad that it circles back around to being a work of art. The jokes aren’t just in the text; they are the text. Every clunking adverb, every overwrought simile, every plot twist that defies not just logic but the fundamental laws of physics is a deliberate (we must assume) piece of a grand, hilarious design.

Fellow authors, perhaps sensing they are in the presence of a force they cannot comprehend, have offered praise. Richard Osman wishes he “was half as critically respected as Garth Marenghi,” a noble, if futile, aspiration. Dermot O’Leary, in a confession that reveals a charming recklessness, admits to buying all three novels but reading them in the wrong order. A foolhardy choice that could lead to cerebral whiplash in a less robust reader.

In conclusion, to not read This Bursted Earth is to live a life of quiet, un-burst normalcy. It is to stare at the sky and see only stars, blind to the terrifying, non-Catherine-wheel-related truth. It is to walk through a world ignorant of the Black Steeple and the moustachioed skeleton that hangs over us all, waiting to burst.

The earth, according to Garth Marenghi, has been bursted. Our funny bones, however, have been thoroughly and brilliantly tickled.

Garth Marenghi’s This Bursted Earth: the third volume in his SUNDAY TIMES bestselling TerrorTome series 

‘I wish I was half as critically respected as Garth Marenghi, even if I currently trounce him sales-wise (for now)’ RICHARD OSMAN

‘I bought all three novels of the TerrorTome trilogy in a bargain slipcase edition and have read two of them already. Albeit in the wrong order’ DERMOT O’LEARY

‘Garth’s novels steered me through all two hundred and thirty seven syndicated episodes of TV’s !mpossible‘ RICK EDWARDS



Horror author Nick Steen is having visions . . . A sinister Black Steeple; eerie lights in the sky that look like a Catherine wheel but are not remotely a Catherine wheel . . . Plus a giant skeleton with a moustache. Are they omens? Auguries? Portenderings of things to come? (Spoiler: yes, they are.)

For Nick Steen’s imagination is bursting out of his brain and threatening to burst in turn the entirety of Stalkford.

Can Nick stop the aforesaid bursting? Or have things already slightly burst regardless? Is all that we see or seem merely a dream within an Earth that’s been bursted?

From the fevered imaginata of Horror Fiction’s Grand Frightener Garth Marenghi, author of Sunday Times-bestselling Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome and Garth Marenghi’s Incarcerat, come three freshly rancid tales of . . .

. . .

. . . This Bursted Earth.

   Horror Book Reviews on Ginger Nuts of Horror

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