"The true fantasy classic of our time." --Washington Post Book World
For generations of fantasy fans, this masterpiece ranks as one of the 20th century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. A young earl's future in a sprawling castle could be changed by a feral girl and a cunning servant in this acclaimed gothic fantasy trilogy's second entry. Titus Groan is seven years old, lord and heir to the crumbling castle Gormenghast. A gothic labyrinth of roofs and turrets, cloisters and corridors, stairwells and dungeons, it is also the cobwebbed kingdom of Byzantine government and age-old rituals, a world primed to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, and death. Steerpike, who began his climb across the roofs when Titus was born, is now ascending the spiral staircase to the heart of the castle, and in his wake lie imprisonment, manipulation, and murder . . . Gormenghast is the second volume in Mervyn Peake's acclaimed Gormenghast trilogy, but it's much more than a sequel to Titus Groan--it's an enrichment and deepening of that book. Introduction by Tad Williams