Grendel Wept leaps forth from a literary tradition started by the surreal Hermeticsim of Poe and Machen; the ill-starred Gothic of Byron, the Shelleys; and the twilit fin de siècle of Wilde and Maldoror. It is the struggle of Man and the cosmic Other, juxtaposed with Man’s struggle against himself, first spelled out in the earliest oral myths of Titanian cosmology, now given novel form.