His renditions of Peake’s cast – from the enigmatic Countess Groan to the spidery manservant Flay – seethe with life and feeling, capturing the often stark surrealism of each book. Eschewing the traditionally gloomy and gothic, McKean’s concept has been inspired by the Gormenghast trilogy’s often overlooked sense of passion and colour. Award-winning illustrator Dave McKean provides the collection’s 142 original hand-drawn illustrations, as well as startling cover designs for each book and an exclusive art print of iconic villain Steerpike. Award-winning fantasist Neil Gaiman – yet another Peake devotee – examines the trilogy’s appeal in his expert introduction to this unique Folio edition.Įncased within a suitably majestic presentation box, this spellbinding set is as much a feat of imaginative design as the novels themselves.
The trilogy has cast its singular spell over generations of readers, writers, illustrators and musicians including Chris Riddell, Michael Moorcock, Sebastian Faulks, Joanne Harris, Sting and The Cure frontman Robert Smith. They echo the grotesquery of Dickens, the cruel fabulism of Lewis Carroll, and the wonder and scope of Tolkien, yet Gormenghast continues to defy categorisation. The Gormenghast novels themselves remain truly without precedent. Forty years later, The Times recognised Peake as one of the Fifty Greatest British Writers since 1945. The trilogy quickly outgrew its cult reputation, its popularity skyrocketing following the author’s death in 1968. This royal household soon find themselves threatened not only by the ill-omened birth of Titus – the seventy-seventh Earl of Groan – but also the rapid ascent of a Machiavellian kitchen boy named Steerpike, a character long recognised as one of the most compelling and complex villains in English literature. The Gormenghast trilogy is a mesmerising dynastic saga, often surreal and darkly comic, in which the eccentric House of Groan rules over a world of crumbling stone and meaningless ritual. Limited to 750 hand-numbered sets, each collection has been personally signed by Gaiman and McKean on a beautifully illustrated limitation label. This landmark edition also comes with an exclusive original art print and is introduced by Neil Gaiman, another master of the modern fantastic. An author, poet, playwright and artist, Peake wrote with a painter’s eye, his peculiar flair for life and colour perfectly captured in brand-new illustrations by World Fantasy Award-winning artist and designer Dave McKean.
A new and innovative vision of these classic works, this monumental box-set collection is truly worthy of one of the wildest imaginations in literature. This is the world of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, three masterpieces of the fantastic – Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950) and Titus Alone (1959) – collected by Folio in an edition as unprecedented as the books themselves. A labyrinth of ritual, mystery and conspiracy.
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