TITUS GROAN (Peake, 1946)

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Thanks to his sublime cadence, his intricate and labyrinthine use of limited locations, and deeply-drawn characters, Peake managed the heretofore impossible with the first of his Gormenghast novels: crafted a fantasy series that I'm itching to read every bit of.

As I've also been reading Alan Moore's (or, rather, "The Original Writer") run on MIRACLEMAN, the influence of Peake on Moore is even more apparent – indeed, I think it was this article that pushed me to check out Peake’s work as Moore’s description intrigued me):

The young Moore tore through Edgar Rice Burroughs, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, HP Lovecraft and, especially, Mervyn Peake. The Gormenghast novels, he says, “were probably the first books where I began to understand just what you could do with writing: how he could conjure this entire complex environment and these almost fluorescent characters that stayed in your mind for ever”.

To be certain, Peake's wonderful, "fluorescent," characters will stay with me, friends for life; a delight. My complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.