Titus Groan
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.
Description
Dreamlike and macabre, Mervyn Peake’s extraordinary novel Titus Groan—first in the Gormenghast Trilogy—is one of the most astonishing and fantastic works in modern fiction.
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—and the castle is peopled by dark characters in half-lit corridors.
Introduction by Anthony Burgess
Praise for the Gormenghast Trilogy:
“There is nothing in literature like Mervyn Peake’s remarkable Gormenghast novels . . . They were crafted by a master, who was also an artist, and they take us to an ancient castle as big as a city, with heroes and villains and people larger than life that are impossible to forget.” —Neil Gaiman
“[Peake’s books] are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience.” —C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia
“His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing.” —San Francisco Chronicle
