‘Boy in Darkness’ comprises a chapter in the life of Titus Groan that unfolds beyond the pages of Peake’s monumental Gormenghast trilogy. It begins on the occasion of Titus’s fourteenth birthday. Overwhelmed by the pomp and gruelling ritual of life in Gormenghast, he braves an escape from his hereditary gaol. Beyond the castle walls, Titus wanders into a sinister and soulless land, where he is captured by Goat and Hyena, the grotesque henchmen of an evil master intent on claiming young Titus’s soul. A disturbingly atmospheric tale, told with the force and simplicity of allegory, ‘Boy in Darkness’ distils the strange logic of the Gormenghast trilogy into a story of pith and mystery, which bears comparison with Kafka and Poe.
