SFF Author: Mervyn Peake

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

I completed the first installment of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series with a sense of exhaustion. It is a colossal book, written with such dense language that reading through it is like gorging on words. It was the book equivalent of eating a very rich, very large chocolate cake. Behind all the intricacies and techniques of the language is an equally strange story, one that does not easily fit into any particular genre. In my local bookstore at least, it is shelved in the “fantasy”

Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast books are a difficult series to categorize in terms of genre, as they really are in a league of their own. Whenever the subject of Peake has arisen in conversation and I’ve been called upon to describe them to the uninitiated, my efforts are always rewarded with baffled looks. The books defy most attempts at classification; and although they’re usually put in the “fantasy” section of libraries and bookstores, the trilogy is bereft of the usual Tolkienesque fantasy trappings (mystical creatures,