If the luxuriant sentences and sly humor in Titus Groan won you over—the way Peake lingers on Dr. Prunesquallor’s tittering asides, or paints Swelter’s kitchen with grotesque grandeur—then Clarke’s antiquated, elegant prose will feel like home. You’ll savor the footnoted asides and arch narration as much as you did the wry depiction of Gormenghast’s rituals, while the book’s dry, mordant comedy echoes the tone around Steerpike’s oh‑so‑polite treacheries.

If you were mesmerized by the suffocating specificity of Gormenghast—the dust-caked corridors, Fuchsia’s attic nook, the ossified ceremonies that even Earl Sepulchrave must endure—then New Crobuzon’s teeming districts will scratch the same itch. Miéville builds a lived-in, grimy metropolis as vivid as the Castle’s kitchens and crypts, and the city’s political and social machinery hums beneath the plot like the hidden gears behind Steerpike’s rise.

If the leisurely drift of Titus Groan drew you in—the way time seems to pool in corridors while Flay and Swelter circle one another, or how family customs weigh on Titus and Fuchsia—Crowley’s patient, drifting narrative will delight you. Edgewood’s rooms, thresholds, and generations accrete meaning with the same gradual, enveloping power as Gormenghast’s rites, rewarding you for lingering in the hush between events.

If Steerpike’s careful ladder-climbing—the staged heroics during the library fire, the soft-spoken flattery of Cora and Clarice—fascinated you, Baru’s razor-edged ascent through an empire’s bureaucratic rituals will grip you just as hard. Where Gormenghast’s titles and etiquette are tools for stealthy ambition, Baru weaponizes ledgers and protocol, turning ceremony into a battleground with stakes as chilling as any duel in the Castle’s shadowed halls.

If you relished the uncanny, morbid whimsy of Titus Groan—the grotesque pageantry, the nightmarish kitchen feasts, the way the Castle itself feels sentient—Catling’s mythic forest will enthrall you. The Vorrh radiates the same oneiric menace that hangs over Steerpike’s machinations and Fuchsia’s lonely wanderings, immersing you in a dreamlike geography where symbolism and the surreal constantly warp reality.