dual personalities

Visiting a bookstore with my mother when I was around twelve, I nagged her into letting me buy the first couple volumes of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy. I chose them because the cover art was cool and the writing clearly awesome. My mother, who read them before I did, found them beautiful but rather nightmarish. It was some years before I actually read the books myself, but once I did I was hooked. Here’s why:

There was a library and it is ashes. Let its long length assemble. Than its stone walls its paper walls are thicker; armoured with learning, with philosophy, with poetry that drifts or dances clamped though it is in midnight. Shielded with flax and calfskin and a cold weight of ink, there broods the ghost of Sepulchrave, the melancholy Earl, seventy-sixth lord of half-light.

It is five years ago. Witless of how his death by owls approaches he mourns through each languid gesture, each fine-boned feature, as though his body were glass and at its centre his inverted heart like a pendant tear.

and

The moon slid inexorably into its zenith, the shadows shriveling to the feet of all that cast them, and as Rantel approached the hollow at the hem of the Twisted Woods he was treading in a pool of his own midnight.

So if you need to escape the mundane world of straight lines, sharp angles, and normalcy, pay a visit to Gormenghast!