YMMV / Gormenghast

• Complete Monster: Steerpike is a vicious sociopath who was once a kitchen boy but rose to become of the most powerful figures in Gormenghast. Steerpike sets fire to Earl Sepulchrave Groan's beloved library, resulting in the Earl's insanity and eventual suicide, setting himself up as a hero who rescued everyone else within. Steerpike burns the master of ritual, Barquentine, to death to steal his position and steadily either discredits or murders those who stand in his path while also seducing Fuchsia Groan, plotting to dispose of her as well. Steerpike kills Sepulchrave's twin sisters by sealing them in a room and leaving them to starve, murdering the former servant Flay when he and Young Earl Titus catch Steerpike gloating to the corpses years later. Escaping into the castle, Steerpike decides to destroy everyone he can if he cannot rule the castle. Described as having forsaken any conscience he might once had possessed, Steerpike will lie, cheat and murder, stopping at nothing to claim power he feels should be his.
• Draco in Leather Pants: Steerpike is adored by fans despite his many atrocities. Though even the biggest leather pants fetishist may have second thoughts when they read what Steerpike planned to do to Fuchsia...
• First Installment Wins: The first two novels, which take place almost wholly within the castle, are more remembered and talked about than Titus Alone.
• Heartwarming Moments: Young Titus playing marbles with Dr. Prunesquallor and Professor Belgrove.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Some modern music fans might smirk at Steerpike's origins as "a jumped-up pantry boy who never knew his place".
• Magnificent Bastard: Steerpike begins life as a lowly boy in the kitchens who is able to scheme and connive his way into becoming one of the most powerful figures in all of Gormenghast. Arranging for the downfall of the favored retainer Flay, Steerpike seduces Earl Sepulchrave Groan's daughter Fuchsia and burns Sepulchrave's library to drive the Earl mad, painting himself as the hero who saved everyone from the fire he engineered. Murdering Master of Ritual Barquentine to claim his position, Steerpike also manipulates and later entraps Sepulchrave's sisters in his schemes until they depend entirely on him and he may leave them to starve. Even when exposed, Steerpike is able to use his intellect and resourcefulness to hide out within Gormenghast, waging a one-man war against the Groans and all their forces. Only stopped by a freak flood, Steerpike defiantly dies snarling his hatred of hero Titus Groan as he passes.
• Misaimed Fandom: the turrets, vaults, and labyrinths of Gormenghast Castle, its bizarre rituals and crazed denizens, have been compelling and alluring to generations of readers. Peake, however, assumed that everyone would sympathize with Titus' disgust for the place and his need to escape it.
• Moral Event Horizon: Steerpike's murder of the twins.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • In the second book, Steerpike's murder of Barquentine by setting him on fire, and the ensuing events in which the burning Barquentine grabs hold of him, and Steerpike only survives by diving into the moat and ends up permanently scarred.
  • While Flay is roaming the castle at night, he's horrified to hear the screams of Clarice and Cora as they perish from hunger and dehydration; he tries desperately to find where the screams are coming from so that he can help, but he's unable to locate the locked room and can only listen helplessly as the cries grow fainter and finally cease.
• Paranoia Fuel: The companion novella Boy in Darkness. In its entirety. Also Nightmare Fuel.
• Periphery Demographic: A lot of "serious" literature critics and English professors, the kinds that usually look down on fantasy fiction, love Mervyn Peake's more grounded and politically driven take on the genre. Yale literature professor Harold Bloom (perhaps the most "traditional" and therefore snobbiest literary scholar in America) put it in his updated Western Canon as one of the premiere books of the 20th century.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Fuchsia is one of the main characters of the story, and one of the few who's as discontented with life in Gormenghast as Titus is. And yet she's unceremoniously killed off in a way that doesn't advance the story at all and just seems to indicate that Peake simply lost interest in her.
• The Woobie: Nannie Slagg. She's eighty years old, three feet tall, and perpetually on the verge of tears. Also, her husband died of a stroke on their wedding night. Poor woman.
  • Steerpike was a bit of a woobie early on, particularly when you consider his non-person status among the other members of the castle. And most especially when you consider that Swelter was not only tremendously abusive to the kitchen boys (including Steerpike), but it is implied that he also sexually molested and cannibalised them. A childhood like that has to mess you up a little. Even if he didn't fit his leather pants quite so well, Steerpike would have started out as a Sympathetic Murderer, at least until his first or second Moral Event Horizon.
    • A lot of the aristocracy also deserve Woobie status, because although they are completely batshit insane and a little stupid, they aren't bad people. The Opheliac Creepy Twins Cora and Clarice didn't deserve such a prolonged and brutal death at Steerpike's hands. And Fuchsia was just in love and insanely sheltered, with the hereditary insanity that seems to possess everybody in her family. You've got to feel a little sorry for her, too.
  • The "Thing" was essentially born into Woobiehood, although she dies too soon for Peake to really showcase this much.
  • Black Rose in the third book is a still young woman who saw her lover murdered, was imprisoned in a concentration camp, then freed by the guard Veil, only to suffer even worse abuse at his hands. Titus frees her, only for her to die happy the moment she's in a safe place.

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