The trouble is, it's always been the off-Peake season. I was lucky enough to be helped by Richard Booth (the " King of Hay" himself), who remarked sadly that he didn't have any of the books in stock that it was, in fact, the off-Peake season. Those who explore Gormenghast castle will be richly rewarded.When I was 15, years before they'd even thought of having a book festival in Hay-on-Wye, I was hunting around the secondhand bookshops of that town for first editions of my new hero, Mervyn Peake. This true classic is a feast of words unlike anything else in the world of fantasy. Unforgettable characters with names like Steerpike and Prunesquallor make their way through an architecturally stifling world, with lots of dark corners around to dampen any whimsy that might arise. Peake has been compared to Dickens, Tolkien, and Peacock, but the Gormenghast trilogy is truly unique. On every day of the year from three hours before daybreak until about eleven o'clock, when the scaffolding and ladders became a hindrance to the cooks, the Grey Scrubbers fulfilled their hereditary calling." "The walls of the vast room which were streaming with calid moisture, were built with gray slabs of stone and were the personal concern of a company of eighteen men known as the 'Grey Scrubbers'. Peake's command of language and unique style set the tone and shape of an intricate, slow-moving world of ritual and stasis: The Gormenghast royal family, the castle's decidedly eccentric staff, and the peasant artisans living around the dreary, crumbling structure make up the cast of characters in these engrossing stories. The trilogy continues with the novels Gormenghast and Titus Alone, and all three books are bound together in this single-volume edition. 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.
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