The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy. Mervyn Peake’s darkly imaginative Gothic fantasy trilogy

He is born to rule Gormenghast, but everything in him longs to escape it. Gormenghast is the vast, crumbling castle to which Titus Groan, seventy-seventh Earl, is lord and heir. A Gothic labyrinth of turrets and dungeons, with its own ceremonies and age-old laws, Gormenghast has stood so long that its ritual seems stronger than life itself. Titus is born into this inheritance: a castle of eccentric subjects, hidden rivalries and rooms thick with memory.
But things are changing. From the kitchens, the clever and ruthless Steerpike begins his climb towards power, while murder, madness and betrayal unsettle the old order. As Titus grows, the role prepared for him becomes harder to bear: to rule Gormenghast is also to be ruled by it. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy is a classic Gothic fantasy about inheritance, ritual, rebellion and the longing for freedom beyond the castle walls.
Baroque, macabre and utterly singular, it remains one of literature's great imagined worlds.'A master of the macabre and a traveller through the deeper and darker chasms of the imagination' The Times 'Dark, dense, baroque and hauntingly beautiful. Peake's lush prose and imagery are a pleasure to any lover of the beauty of the written word, ' Carlos Ruiz-Zafron, author of The Shadow of the Wind