Gormenghast

I've officially started reading the Gormenghast novels by Mervyn Peake... Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone. They are long, at least when taken all together, and the writing is flat-out insane... something that would be Gothic if it didn't have such a sly intellectual feel under all the rococo imagery. It really makes me want to write, and I mean write brutally, for the sake of writing, with no regard for the reader. Peake sure didn't have any. As the smallest possible example of what I mean, here's his description of someone peering through a keyhole:

...he was able by dint of concentration to observe, within three inches of his keyholed eye, an eye which was not his, being not only of a different colour to his own iron marble but being, which is more convincing, on the other side of the door.

Owwww. It hurts, it hurrrts... please don't stop.