"Warning: offensive content!" shrieks the cover. Well, that's true; but sadly it's more in terms of quality than gratuitousness. Having scored a considerable hit with their spoof of the disaster novel, Earthdoom!, Dave Langford and "John Grant" set out to do the same for the horror novel with Guts. Sadly, they went rather too far over the top. They threw everything into the mix; the prose channels the literary excesses of Lionel Fanthorpe, the jokes are way too knowing and the fourth wall is breached with excessive regularity. The funniest thing in it was a translation of the first two verses of Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky into German, and I had to wait until page 165 out of 173 for it. You've heard of bad books that are so bad, they're good; well, this is so good at what it does, it's bad. ( )

I am a big fan of Langford's critical essays, and a hopeful follower of his humorous fiction. I tend to enjoy the first 10 pages of his parodies too: so, since this is 173 pages, I was hoping for something more. Sadly, it's just a parody, at agonising length. With 30 pages to go, I thought the authors were building up to presenting a clever resolution. But they didn't.
Don't worry about the content warning. It's all very messy, but the characters are all so unengaging it's difficult to care too much.