Terry Pratchett meets... Lovecraft? Everything in this book is huge, mysterious, grotesque, strange, dense, and absurd. This would usually be right down my alley, but somehow in this case it didn't quite click. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood, but I think the darkness and complex language on top of all the weirdness was just all a bit much for me, in the end.

When I was a kid I read these books called The Edge Chronicles - similarly, these had everything be big, weird, strange, with these crazy grotesque double-page illustrations by Chris Riddell (one of my favourite illustrators even now). I remember liking the first few books of these because throughout all of this Lovecraftian scale, it was still light in tone and style. In the later books, these shifted to fit to the rest of the narrative, and it all just became a bit much. Gormenghast felt the same.