The Sex Pistols sang ‘I don’t want a holiday in the sun’ and they were right. I don’t. As a best-selling horror writer tasked with preparing humankind for the forthcoming apocalypse, I don’t have time for holidays. My chosen vocation (not vacation, keep up) as a 25-hour-a-day visionary horror author (plus Horrotica for the unbound among you*) simply won’t allow it. I even take my typewriter into the toilet with me.

Bill Butler Yeats said it well (not best) when he sang ‘the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned’. For that reason alone, I won’t consider any package holiday trip to the continent and would entreat any wayward souls embarking on their own personal Club 18–30, 48-hour whirlwind Ibiza Maelstrom Descent to cast an immediate protective spell if they have any friends of the Wicca persuasion and, more crucially, wear one. 

Billy Yeats continues ‘what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’ Well, if you want the answer to that one, friend, stop wasting my time enquiring about personal holiday preferences and call Joe Swash instead, who will happily fill your cold February anecdote quota and then some. The hour, as Yeats so aptly sang, is indeed coming (round at last). 

Mine, 

Garth Marenghi, Frightnerman, Doomsage, author of Garth Marenghi’s Incarcerat, sequel to the Sunday Times-bestselling Garth Marenghi’s TerrorTome, plus visionary.

*By which, ironically, I do mean bound. As in trussed.

Garth Marenghi’s Incarcerat Book Tour, Tuesday 6 February–Saturday 2 March.