Introducing: The Gormenghast Slow Read

All the details for our upcoming read!

These are my beautiful Folio Society editions, the jewel of my home library. I’ll be sharing more about these, I’m sure.

Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy is a world unto itself; so much so, it is notoriously hard to pin down even its genre. There are no sorcerers or dragons here, no spells or magical objects, but there is the feel of the otherworldly, the feel of a fantasy realm. There is a crumbling castle, a prickly villain, a young hero. There is a cast of unusual, eccentric characters that leap off the page.

And there is much magic in the writing itself, because nobody wrote (or writes) like Mervyn Peake. He was an artist as well as a novelist, and his extraordinary vision enlivens the canvas of Gormenghast. These are works of remarkable visual intensity, and it’s hard to convey their wonder without simply urging you to read them for yourself. Even those of you who wouldn’t consider yourselves readers of fantasy—and remember, they are not really fantasy at all—would find plenty to enjoy here. Indeed, you’d be hard pushed not to: they are great works of art.

The Gormenghast books are much-loved, but everyone who reads them inevitably asks why the books are not known even more widely. Often compared with the success of Tolkien’s contemporaneous Lord of the Rings, these more slippery novels have slid slightly into the shadows. (And really, the books are nothing alike.) So I am performing what I see as my duty, and aiming to share them with more people through our upcoming slow read.

How will it work?

The trilogy is made up of the following: Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone—the last of which is considerably shorter than the first two, and written in a rather different style (we’ll get to that). Luckily for us, the novels are split into fairly short chapters or sections, meaning we’ll be reading one chapter a day starting on 1^st November.¹ This amounts to a few pages per day (somewhere between two and ten, typically). If all goes well, the schedule will run like so:

• Titus Groan: 1^st November 2025 – 10^th January 2026

• One week break

• Gormenghast: 17^th January 2026 – 7^th April 2026

• Titus Alone: 8^th April 2026 – 1^st May 2026

This is a longer timeline than I originally intended! But I think the books will reward this pace, and it will give us time to appreciate Peake’s achievement with them. His language can be dense and require some untangling, and the curling plot lines are occasionally obscure, so taking it intentionally slowly should ameliorate some of its difficulties.

I also hope reading just a few pages a day makes it less difficult to incorporate the pages into your reading life. My advice is to pick a time of day when you’ll read them and make it habitual in that way; ideally it’d be something you do every day. Maybe you read them first thing in the morning, or over your morning coffee. Perhaps it’d be during your commute or just before bed. And to help you get the most out of your reading—much like with the Little, Big slow read—I will be producing daily posts with regular podcast episodes that will guide you through the chapters with context and analysis. So that you can get a feel for it, the first four episodes of this slow read will be free, and then it will be available to paid subscribers!

As with the previous slow read, I will not be sending future Gormenghast posts out to all subscribers, so if you do want to join, please make sure you are signed up to the ‘Slow Reads’ section by clicking here and adjusting your notification settings. And if you won’t be joining us for this one, you’ve no need to worry about excessive emails! (If you are subscribing for the first time, you will still have to do this as an extra step.)

I think that’s all for now! All you need is a copy of Titus Groan to get started, and I’ll be in touch very soon.

1. This differs slightly for Titus Alone, but again, we’ll get to that next year!