A light to strangle infants by

Despite being told that it was nowhere near as good as its prequels, my completist ass picked up Mervyn Peake’s Titus Alone, the third book in the Gormenghast trilogy. It’s a lot shorter than the other two, which is probably just as well, because truly, it isn’t as good! Like, it wasn’t bad, and it was certainly just as weird, but it wasn’t as rich, and the atmosphere was very different–less Gothic and more a sort of absurdist sci-fi, Ozian flavor, but not for children (i.e. it’s got too many tiddies in it for Oz).

Having run away from Gormenghast, Titus finds himself in a strange and unnamed city, where he is promptly arrested for vagrancy and meets a variety of very strange people, one of whom is a nice lady named Juno who saves him from the Kafkaesque mercies of the court. The other most important figure who winds up on Team Titus (more or less) is Muzzlehatch, a weird old guy with a car and a zoo full of wild animals, who is also coincidentally Juno’s ex. Muzzlehatch provides Titus with the information needed to escape some scrape or other through a demimonde called the Under-River, where we meet, you guessed it, a bunch more weird absurd characters. Upon resurfacing from the Under-River a fevered Titus gets rescued by a young lady named Cheeta, the daughter of a renowned scientist who runs a factory where he does some kind of unspecified death ray science. Cheeta is mostly characterized as being very smart and very small. She falls in love with Titus, and when an un-fevered Titus turns out to not really like her but he does want to bang her, she is very insulted and her love turns to hatred and she embarks upon a complicated revenge plot to drive him mad, which I admit I have some sympathy for (I realize it is perfectly morally neutral to find someone hot even if you don’t like them that much, but for God’s sake, don’t tell them that). Nobody in the book talks or behaves remotely like a normal human being. Inexplicably it is still compelling. Honestly I really just don’t know what to make of this one.

What the hell did I just read

Several years ago a friend who knew I was interested in bananas Victorian Gothics recommended me The Beetle, so I was excited when, on the heels of the success of Dracula Daily, some enterprising fellow fan of goofy Victorian Gothics started The Beetle Weekly, specifically promising us more of everything that made Dracula bad and less of anything that made Dracula good, even though The Beetle outsold Dracula by like a factor of four the year it was released.

The Beetle starts off relatively strong with a sympathetic story of a down-on-his luck clerk, Robert Holt, who has been reduced to vagrancy via the pitiless capitalism of pre-welfare-state Britain and finds himself, in desperation, crawling through the open window of an apparently uninhabited house. He is incorrect about the uninhabited state of the house and that is where the horrors begin, and also it is all downhill from there, because the horrors are fucking goofy and also pretty racist. Bobert (as he is known to fandom) is hypnotized by an ambiguously gendered brown person whomst can also shape-shift into a giant scarab beetle, and this beetle/person sends Bobert to burglarize the house of an up-and-coming statesman named Paul Lessingham, even though Bobert does not actually have any burglarizing skills, being actually an unemployed clerk. This begins a comedy of errors–that thinks it’s a thrilling horror story–of Bobert breaking ineptly into Paul Lessingham’s house to steal his letters, Paul Lessingham having a mental breakdown when Bobert yells “THE BEETLE!” at him, and a mostly-nude Bobert running hypnotizedly away and straight into Paul’s romantic rival and our second narrator, absolute shithead Sydney Atherton.

Sydney Atherton is an “inventor” who is in love with Marjorie Lindon, his childhood friend who has become secretly engaged to Paul Lessingham, and who ought to be but is not in love with Dora Grayling, a wealthy young maiden who wants to marry Atherton and fund all his horrible inventions, like death gas for conquering South America. They have some very bizarre interactions, including one where Dora wants Sydney to “demonstrate” the death gas and then gets upset when he uses it to kill a random cat that he picked up off the street and decided was Paul Lessingham’s cat. There is some third person around who also is in love with Marjorie Lindon and Sydney almost kills him by continually Fortifying His Nerves with hard liquors on an empty stomach. Atherton hates Lessingham and continually calls him “the Apostle” which is sort of appropriate given how obnoxiously sanctimonious Lessingham is, except that Sydney is even more obnoxious. For some absolutely inexplicable reason everybody keeps coming to Sydney for like, life advice and stuff–Marjorie, Dora, Marjorie’s dad, and even Paul! Most of the things they want advice on are how to deal with one or more of the other people coming to Sydney for advice, so he kind of bumbles around letting them all eavesdrop on each other while hiding in his death-gas-inventing studio.

Things take a twist when a nearly-dead Bobert passes out in front of Marjorie’s house and she, taking over the narration, takes him in and gives him a bath and some food and calls Sydney to see what the heck she should do about this babbling unfortunate that she picked up because she is sooo compassionate and charitable even though she’s actually never passed up a chance to be nasty to anyone once in this entire book. Sydney, having run into Bobert previously and also been the subject of some completely unsolicited confessions from “the Apostle,” is super jazzed to know exactly what Bobert is babbling about but refuses to tell Marjorie about it because he’s a vicious little misogynist, so instead all he tells her is that it’s terribly dangerous and he and Bobert are going out and can he borrow a revolver and also she can’t come because it’s too dangerous, so obviously she insists upon going because he won’t actually tell her what’s too dangerous (she does not, however, bring a revolver, even though the one thing she does know about this situation is that Sydney thinks it’s the kind of dangerous that can be helped with a revolver). This is how Marjorie gets lost in the house that hypnotized Bobert earlier.

From here we move to our last narrator, the previously unintroduced solicitor Augustus Champnell, because what’s a nineteenth century Gothic without a serious, sober-minded solicitor to document that all the horrors are real and definitely not wild fancies? It’s not like we have to trust Sydney, both because he’s a mad scientist who’s been huffing poison gases or whatever and because far from a disinterested party. Paul and Sydney both immediately seek the services of Champnell in bailing them out of whatever nonsense they’re involved in, which is how we get Paul’s full backstory, finally–a jaw-droppingly racist lurid fantasy of evil Isis-worshiping Arabs in colonized Egypt who capture white Christian Englishwomen and sometimes Englishmen and subject them to various tortures and sexual assaults and such before offering them up to a giant beetle idol as human sacrifices and burning them alive. All very normal. Anyway, after hearing this remarkable story, and doing some extremely funny Marx Brothers-sounding shit where the three grown men bounce around town in a hansom cab built for only two passengers, Champnell, Atherton, and Lessingham chase the Beetle and Bobert and a captive Marjorie all around southern England in a variety of hansoms, carriages, and trains, until the Beetle is finally defeated via an off-screen train crash and also the underground Beetle Isis cult human sacrifice caves over in Egypt coincidentally explode for no documented reason whatsoever. A solicitor is telling us this so you know it’s very serious and not at all funny business.

Truly this book is awful in every way nineteenth century British writing can be awful all at once, and then some. I had so much fun reading it along with a bunch of insane people on Tumblr and Discord so we could all make fun of it endlessly and try to figure out what in the name of Aryan Jesus Richard Marsh was thinking. Just a remarkable feat of bad Victoriana.