If they don't get it, it doesn't matter because it's not the main point of the joke … There's a whole bunch of stuff for people if they want it."Micallef's life in comedy also meant he was more than comfortable leaning into a perceived "silly" side of vampire novels in De'Ath Takes a Holiday.He suggests Victorian novelists like Stoker and Frankenstein progenitor Mary Shelley were "in on the joke"."There is an overblown revelling in the ludicrousness of the stories they're telling," he says."Dracula is a pretty sexy story too It still makes me laugh today.He resolved to "parody or quote or just revel" in writing in the style of books like The Diary of a Nobody or the Boy's Own magazines that first inspired his love of reading.He also drew on the epistolary mode of Victorian novels like Dracula and Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, integrating diary entries, court transcripts and even case notes from psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud."I try to honour that tradition in this version of a gothic romance novel," Micallef says.But it wasn't until the final third of De'Ath Takes a Holiday that he felt truly comfortable writing in Roger's voice."I don't want to give anything away, but at the end of the book there's a giant sea creature made of drowned zombies," Micallef says."I can't attribute this to anybody else