The crumbling towers of Gormenghast and the evil machinations of Steerpike could be set to head to the big screen after Neil Gaiman revealed he was in talks with studios about a film adaptation of Mervyn Peake’s gothic fantasy novels.

Adapted for television by the BBC in 2000 as a miniseries starring Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the scheming Steerpike, Peake’s series of three novels tracing the life of Titus, 77th Earl of Groan, “heir to a crumbling summit: to a sea of nettles: to an empire of red rust: to rituals’ footprints ankle-deep in stone”, have also been adapted for radio and theatre.

But Gaiman, a fan of the series, revealed last week that he was set to begin discussions about turning the novels into a film. “Tomorrow we start talking to studios, and will soon find out which of them wants to make Mervyn Peake’s wonderful Gormenghast as a movie,” he wrote on Twitter, later retweeting a fan who had advised him: “do not let Peter Jackson anywhere near it. I don’t want to watch 9 Gormenghast films. I ★would★, but I don’t want to.”

Fabian Peake, Mervyn Peake’s son, welcomed the possibility. “It is wonderful news that progress is being made on the filming of my father’s books. Plans for making a film, with Neil Gaiman as the writer, have been going on for a while now,” he said, describing himself as “very excited by the prospect of a Gormenghast film”.

Peake’s three novels, Titus Groan, Gormenghast and Titus Alone, were published in 1946, 1950 and 1959. The sequence opens with Titus’s birth, “suckled on shadows; weaned, as it were, on webs of ritual: for his ears, echoes, for his eyes, a labyrinth of stone: and yet within his body something other – other than this umbrageous legacy”. By the second novel, seven-year-old Titus is contending with the ambitions of kitchen boy Steerpike – “limb by limb, it appeared that he was sound enough, but the sum of these several members accrued to an unexpectedly twisted total” - as he begins to take on the mantle of the ruler of Gormenghast:

“What do I care for the symbolism of it all? What do I care if the castle’s heart is sound or not? I don’t want to be sound anyway! Anybody can be sound if they’re always doing what they’re told. I want to live! Can’t you see? Oh, can’t you see? I want to be myself, and become what I make myself, a person, a real live person and not a symbol anymore.”

The books are seen as classics of fantasy and are much loved by many authors. Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis once called Peake’s books “actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience”.

Anthony Burgess said that the Gormenghast trilogy was “one of the most important works to come out of the age that produced The Four Quartets, The Unquiet Grave, Brideshead Revisited, The Loved One, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four”, while Marcus Sedgwick described Gormenghast as ahead of its time in a piece for the Guardian.

“There is such splendour to be found in Peake’s most important work; there is darkness, yes, but there is also gentleness, humour, pathos, beauty, tragedy and a love of the written word, and how it can elucidate human nature, that means Peake deserves a wider readership,” Sedgwick wrote.

Peake died in 1968. Five years ago, it emerged that he had written a page-and-a-half of notes about a fourth book in the series, Titus Awakes, which had been completed by his wife Maeve Gilmore. The novel was published in 2011, to mark the centenary of Peake’s birth.