Gormenghast (Gormenghast Trilogy, #2)

by Mervyn Peake

THERE ARE TIMES when the emotions are so clamorous and the rational working of the mind so perfunctory that there is no telling where the actual leaves off and the images of fantasy begin.

From the castle windows it seemed that the dazzling snow had been scattered with small coals, or that the fields had become smallpox’d with the winter-murder’d hosts. There was no clear stretch of snow untriturated by this widespread death; no drift without its graveyard.