At best, these characters are a little fey, or what my mother would have called 'affected' the worst of them are seriously deranged, hideously deformed grotesques, or both.The events of the novel form a backdrop for the ambitious rise of the kitchen boy Steerpike. They are attended by a retinue of servants and retainers, with their own agendas of ambition, revenge, hate and love. Gormenghast castle forms a self-contained community, within which members of the Groan dynasty live, die, go mad, commune with birds and act out arcane rituals. This novel, the first in the Gormenghast trilogy (though a fragment of a fourth volume has recently been completed), details the events of a year in the fantastic castle of Gormenghast, from the birth of Titus, 77th Earl, through to shortly after his first birthday. Those who explore Gormenghast castle will be richly rewarded.” - SFF Book Reviews Read more This true classic is a feast of words unlike anything else in the world of fantasy. “Mervyn Peake’s gothic masterpiece, the Gormenghast trilogy, begins with the superlative Titus Groan, a darkly humorous, stunningly complex tale of the first two years in the life of the heir to an ancient, rambling castle . . . considered by some to have an equal or even greater degree of importance to the development of modern fantasy as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.” - SFF180 It is a very, very great work.” -Robertson Davies, New York Times-bestselling author “Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. Dreamlike and macabre, Peake’s extraordinary novel is one of the most astonishing and fantastic works in modern fiction. The castle is peopled by dark characters in half-lit corridors. Inside of Gormenghast, all events are predetermined by complex rituals, the origins of which are lost in time. Meanwhile, far away and in the kitchen, a servant named Steerpike escapes his drudgework and begins an auspicious ascent to power. He stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle. a moody, melancholy comedy with an underlying wit and profundity that cannot be denied.” - SpeculictionĪs the novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born.

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