About the Author

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) was a playwright, painter, poet, illustrator, short story writer, and designer of theatrical costumes, as well as a novelist. Among his many books are the Gormenghast trilogy (Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone).The Overlook Press publishes these alongside the posthumous sequel Titus Awakes and Peake treasuries The Illustrated Gormenghast Trilogy, Peake's Progress, and The Sunday Books.

Reviews

Praise for Mervyn Peake:
"Gormenghast is grotesque, gory, ghastly, mystical, lyrical, monstrous, mind-bending, and inarticulably beautiful." -- The Scattering Blog
"A gorgeous, volcanic eruption . . . a work of extraordinary imagination." --"The New Yorker"
"Mervyn Peake is a finer poet than Edgar Allan Poe, and he is therefore able to maintain his world of fantasy brilliantly through three novels. It is a very, very great work . . . a classic of our age." --Robertson Davies, author of The Deptford Trilogy
"[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
"The true fantasy classic of our time." --"The Washington Post"
"Peake's style is marvelous... His inventiveness, his ingenuity, and his humor are astonishing." --"San Francisco Chronicle"
"Many readers admire Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, buto

"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
"One of the most important works of the imagination to come out of the age that also produced The Four Quartets," "The Unquiet Grave," "Brideshead Revisited," "The Loved One," "Animal Farm and""1984.""
-- "Anthony Burgess
"His novels, said Burgess, are "aggressively three-dimensional... showing the poet as well as the draughtsman. It is difficult in post-war English fiction to get away with big rhetorical gestures. Peake manages it because, with him, grandiloquence never means diffuseness' there is no musical emptiness in the most romantic of his descriptions. He is always exact... [Titus Groan] remains essentially a work of the closed imagination, in which a world parallel to our own is presented in almost paranoiac denseness of detail. But the madness is illusory, and contr