‘Cragley’s home was bizarre not through a … mistake but because there had been no plans to follow at all. At some point … Cragley had read all the valley’s novels (most of them English Victorian, with James and his lust for the Europeans a freak and a fraud), and decided that people then, and only then, knew how to live. So he … moved to a hut which he modelled, despising the mythical author’s vulgarity while applauding his sense, after the shack in Walden. Then, with a base setup, he began his magnum opus, which grew without plan or even an organizing principle, from one descriptive paragraph to the next: a tower from Charlotte Brontë’s Thornfield Hall, kitchen from Wuthering Heights, staircase à la Miss Havisham, and on and on to the formal gardens of Middlemarch. … The house grew like the sloughed-off skin of a snake that had grown confused, thinking itself now a butterfly, now a cicada twisting its way at wrong right angles out of the brittle shell. Thrusting out or retreating to an unguessable center, the finished thing was a nightmare.’

• Neal Bell, Gone To Be Snakes Now