Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake

Book 1 in the Gormenghast Trilogy:
A doomed lord, an emergent hero, and an array of bizarre creatures haunt the world of the Gormenghast novels which, along with Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, reigns as one of the undisputed fantasy classics of all time. Peake has created a world where all is like a dream—lush, fantastical, vivid, and yet symbolic of a dark struggle.At the center of everything is the seventy-seventh Earl, Titus Groan, who stands to inherit the Gormenghast Castle and its kingdom. When he is crowned, he is called “Child-Inheritor of the rivers, of the Tower of Flints and the dark recesses beneath cold stairways…Child-Inheritor of the spring breezes that blow in from the jarl forests and of the autumn misery in petal, scale, and wing….”
“Robert Whitfield is calm and fastidious-voiced in third-person narration, giving us time to revel in the book’s surreal description and ghastly ambience, depictions so heartless that they are funny. In the book’s dialogue, however, he takes on the Gormenghast menagerie with brio and versatility, giving each character a distinctive, appropriate voice….overall his narration is a masterly rendition of a lurid and haunting work.”—WashingtonPost.com