Castle of the Groans — lead characters in magnificent gothic novel (11)

I haven't cracked this one yet — but the brilliant team at Times for the Times have:

THE GROANS M~ G~* (‘novel’ is the anagram indicator); I had the anagrist, but hadn’t memorised the word from the last time it came up (in the comments to a puzzle less than a month ago). Never read Peake, obvs. Gormenghast was the second novel in the series, Titus Groan being the first. So the anagram fodder is pretty clever.