Titus Groan (Paperback)
Staff Reviews
Whatever you suppose fantasy means (paint-by-number landscapes, a panoply of imitation Legolases) this isn't it. It's the story of a scheming kitchen-boy's precipitous rise and fall, filled to the brim with doomed lords! Vicious knives! Hungry owls! And the word umbrageous! The Gormenghast books blur the real and extra-real, the gothic with the Modern, Kafka with Forster with Nabokov. This book is for the impressionable youth who needs to move beyond Tolkien-- and it's for the reader of serious-stories-only! who must yet learn the uncanny is realer than the real.
— Emily
Whatever you suppose fantasy means (matte painting mountain landscapes, a panoply of imitation Legolases) this isn't it. It's the story of a scheming kitchen-boy's precipitous rise and fall, filled to the brim with drowning girls! Desolate swamps! Hungry owls! And the word umbrageous! The Gormenghast books shade the gothic with the Modern, Tolkien with Forster with Nabokov and a little bit The Castle of Otranto. This book is for the impressionable youth who needs to move beyond Tolkien-- and it's for the reader of serious-stories-only! who must yet learn the uncanny is realer than the real. - EMILY
— From Next Chapter Booksellers' Holiday Gift Guide 2019
Description
As the novel opens, Titus, heir to Lord Sepulchrave, has just been born. He stands to inherit the miles of rambling stone and mortar that form Gormenghast Castle. Meanwhile, far away and in the kitchen, a servant named Steerpike escapes his drudgework and begins an auspicious ascent to power.Inside of Gormenghast, all events are predetermined by complex rituals, the origins of which are lost in time. The castle is peopled by dark characters in half-lit corridors. Dreamlike and macabre, Peake's extraordinary novel is one of the most astonishing and fantastic works in modern fiction.
About the Author
Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a playwright, painter, poet, illustrator, short story writer, and designer of theatrical costumes, as well as a novelist. Among his many books are the celebrated Gormenghast novels, Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone, and the posthumously published Titus Awakes, the lost book of Gormenghast finished by Peake's wife Maeve Gilmore after his death. The Gormenghast novels, as well as Peake's other writings Mr. Pye and Peake's Progress, are all available from The Overlook Press.