Titus Groan asked me to be patient and I was not always willing to be, three hours in and technically nothing had happened yet except a very long description of a poet’s head, and I understand completely why some readers give up around there. Gormenghast, the second book, is where it clicked for me, actual plot pressure finally builds, Steerpike’s ambition curdles from charming to genuinely threatening, and the humor lands sharper once you’re not fighting the prose for every inch.

What I want to defend, though, is the overdescription itself, because I don’t think it’s excess so much as the whole point. The castle has more personality than most of the human characters, its rot, its rituals nobody remembers the origin of anymore, the Duchess and her herd of white cats, and Peake is asking you to live inside that atmosphere rather than race through a plot. It’s closer to reading a very long, very strange poem than a conventional fantasy novel, and it demands the kind of patience Tolkien readers rarely have to summon, there’s no quest map here, just a family slowly losing its grip on a place too large and too old for them.

I’ll say what a lot of people say and admit Titus Alone, the third book, is a real falloff, written while Peake’s health was failing, and it loses almost everything that made the first two work once the story leaves the castle. Doesn’t touch my rating for the first two. This is one of maybe three books I’ve finished and immediately wanted to start over from page one, just to catch what I know I missed the first time through.