Mervyn Peake

Starts with the birth and ends with the first birthday celebrations of the heir to the grand, tradition-bound castle of Gormenghast. A grand miasma of doom and foreboding weaves over the sterile rituals of the castle. Villainous Steerpike seeks to exploit the gaps between the formal rituals and the emotional needs of the ruling family for his own profit.

Titus Groan is seven years old. Lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral staircase to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder. Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake’s widely acclaimed trilogy, but it is much more than a sequel to Titus Groan—it is an enrichment and deepening of that book. The Gormenghast Trilogy ranks as one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable feats of imaginative writing.

Titus, almost 20, flees oppressive Castle Rituals. Lost in a sandstorm, helped by Muzzlehatch owner of traveling zoo and his ex-lover Juno, stranded in big city, arrested for vagrancy, he longs for home. Nobody has heard of Gormenghast, few believe. Titus wants to prove it is real.