Gargoyles

Early one morning a doctor sets out with his son on his daily rounds through the forbidding moutainouse countryside. Their visits, a succession of grotesque portraits- a diabetic industrialist living in incestuous isolation with his half-sister; three brothers, occupying a mill set in a deep gorge, who have just strangled a bevy of exotic birds; a crippled musical prodigy whose sister locks him in a cage- lead them to a castle and a paranoid prince, whose 'almost uninterrupted monologue for a hundred pages is a virtuoso verbal performance ... an extraordinary, somber first novel.