Status Updates From The Illustrated Gormenghast...

They turned with relief to this age-old ceremony as though to something on which they could rely--something that had happened every year since they could remember anything at all. They turned to tradition as a child turns to its mother.

The silence of the Lifeless Halls, like the silence the snow-bound world outside was limitless. It was a kind of death. The very extent of the hollow expanses, the uncharted labyrinth that made, as it were, the silence visible, was something to raise the hairs upon the neck of any but those long used to loneliness.

I understand why this gets bundled into one overall book rather than a trilogy, I've barely started the second one but the flow is rather seamless. Really enjoying this so far. I wish I had a vocabulary half as strong as Mr Peake!

The little doodles in this edition are great. Irma looks exactly how I imagined her 😅

His remark meant nothing at all but it was the only thing he could think of to say.

Whether his face was made of age, as though age were a stuff, or whether age was the abstract of that face of his, that bearded fossil of a thing that smouldered and decayed upon his shoulders--there was no doubt that archaism was there, as though something had shifted from the past into the current moment where it burned darkly through blackened glass in defiance of its own anachronism and the callow present.