Gormenghast

Pros

• Gormenghast: set in a single castle and pretty influential for a generation of UK fantasy authors
• I've always liked the character names in Gormenghast. Whimsical and gothic.
• I thought it was the best BBC fantasy since gormenghast
• The Gormenghast books are just a little boy growing up in a castle full of strange people. The entire book is more of a vibe than a plot.
• mervyn peake’s gormenghast books! weird, psychological horror-fantasy from a writer who was working at the same time as tolkien but doing something completely different. it’s the inverse of an epic quest fantasy, mostly being set in one...

Cons

• The first two books are very gothic, and have some degree of nastiness to them; the third is just weird fantasy. But I wouldn't say they're 'horror'.
• Strange and Norrell took a lot of inspiration from Lud-in-the-mist and Gormenghast (oddly, neither of which I loved despite Strange and Norrell probably being my favorite book of all time. Not sure why they didn’t work as well for me).
• Another good comparison in terms of vivid setting is to Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels, though what Gormenghast is to a Gothic medieval castle, this is to an Art Nouveau Victorian city.
• The only one I vehemently disagree with is Gormenghast. It doesn't fit most definitions of epic fantasy- there isn't any magic- and it's more contained than many under the "more contained" option- it takes place in a single building!
• I'm currently navigating Malazan, Gene Wolfe's works, and Gormenghast. While these are scratching the itch to some extent, I feel like there's something even more unique out there that I'm missing.