The Angel’s Game

In Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s world, books shift between two extremes, with characters treating them like God Almighty or the Ebola virus. Continuing a theme from his 2001 best-seller, The Shadow of the Wind, his latest novel shows people worshipping the printed word—and fearing it and getting infected by it. Game occupies the same ghoulish Barcelona as Wind, this time in the 1920s. We follow the career of David Martin, a copy boy at a second-rate newspaper. He gets his big break writing sensationalistic crime fiction, egged on by a mysterious publisher, who here serves as a Faustus urging authors to sell their souls. Each subsequent step up in his career—to pulpy penny dreadful, then thoughtful novel and finally religious treatise—requires a new Faustian bargain, tainting his soul a little more.

Despite some heavy-handed authorship-as-sin motifs, this is good summer page-turning thanks to the vibrant secondary cast. Best is Martin’s first editor at the newspaper, Don Basilio, a cantankerous lifer who “subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.” Wind’s fantastical Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a lit nerd’s Disneyland, makes a delightful reappearance.

As he sells out, Martin becomes embroiled in a murder mystery of sorts, but his skewed perspective and untrustworthy narration elevate it above a simple whodunit. And if The Angel’s Game never works the reader up to a stay-up-all-night fervor like Zafón’s breakthrough, it’s still a worthy successor. For bibliophiles at the dawn of Kindle mania, Game is reassuring immersion in an eerie world of print, the literary equivalent of Scrooge McDuck’s swan dive into a money pit.—Allison Williams

Zafón reads Tue 16.

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