Zafóning into The Mist Trilogy.

We wanted to eschew reading any more young adult titles, but at the end of The Shadow of the Wind author Carlos Ruiz Zafón narratively fishhooks us by noting that hero character Daniel Sempere grows up and goes on to write The Prince of Mist -- which just happens to be the title of the first of Zafón's YA books. Thus we are caught by the twin barbs of curiosity & compulsion to know if these juvenile works actually have relevance to his masterful adult ones.

Yet in this baiting of our reading cues, we find that while good, Zafón's YA falls a grade just below the texture & completeness of his other The Cemetery of Forgotten Books trilogy. There's the same edgy anticipations, looming gothic structures, innocent characters threatened by past tragedies, and all the darkly delightful earmarks, but it's Zafón-lite. Still, Zafón-lite is better than most other authors on their most gravitas of writing days. 

[Slightly more defined import cover figure than on the U.S. version.]

The Prince of Mist

From the author's opening note:

"I like to believe storytelling transcends age limitations, and I hope readers of my adult novels will be tempted to explore these stories of magic, mystery, and adventure."

A classic R.L. Stevenson thing to say, and entirely appropriate.

This first installment's nothing less than Bradberryesque, a childhood-that-never-was small town paene in the vein of Something Wicked This Way Comes, complete with an equivalent parallel to Mr. Dark, and as sinister a group as Darren Shan's Cirque Du Freak could muster. Like these other two, there are elements that are brutally adult, and like all great children's books, they strive to appeal to all ages so they can both awe the young with their dark wonder, and stand the weathering test of acidic maturity.

Zafón almost spares us the YA trope of orphans, but maintains one character, Roland, as having lost his parents to an accident. Beachcomber Roland befriends seaside town newcomer Max, and by association, his unignorable lovely sister Alicia, which of course makes for a strained relationship dynamic:

"Hey," Max hissed at him. "She's my sister, not a piece of cake. Okay?" [ch 6, p.65] 

As the children's summertime unfolds, weird inexplicable events begin to happen in their old house with a mysterious past, and the search for answers begins. 

When the novella progresses and we just begin to see the adversary, carnival leader Cain's powers are never really defined, and his threat becomes too powerful, and his villainous behaviour too Snidely Whiplash arch, with his motives far less clear than foreclosure or banging virginal Nell:

"In an infinite universe, there were too many things that escaped human understanding." [ch 12, p.147]

Unlike Zafón's The Angel's Game, where a loose magical realism and far more complete style frames the narrative, the above quote allows Cain a limitless supernatural might, which stretches credulity, and makes his lines feel more comic book caricature than realized literary character. 

The Midnight Palace

An even more marked departure from Zafón's familiar home Barcelona, surprisingly set in a past exotic Calcutta, this middle book launches the reader into a vicious in media res beginning chase. This is an English imperial novella, but with some parallels of India pre-liberation to the author's native post-Spanish Civil War. The pacing's quickly constructed, and up & running from the get go.

Starring a cadre of precocious Indian children you so wished were your intellectually wisecracking friends, at childhood's end on the eve of their graduation from a Christian orphanage, we discover they also have in common The Chowbar Society: A secret clique mutually dedicated to aiding each other, meeting in a nearby abandoned house they've dubbed The Midnight Palace, where they sneak off to tell ghost stories, personal confessions, and problem solve. It is this altruistic society that runs up against hunter-villain Jawahal, a dark pyromancer, who, for unknown reasons, is after their new friend Sheere.

In contrast to the pacing, Zafón unfolds the mystery with tantalizing slowness, and the reader is compelled through urban Calcutta to follow these youths to a deadly and long hidden truth.

The Midnight Palace, a place plainly dilapidated with abandoned neglect by day, but is imbued with evocative magic for the teens by night, itself displays Zafón's love of architecture:

"The place exuded that aura of magic and dreams that rarely exists beyond the blurred memories of our early years." [p.79]

The celebratory ornaments of buildings easily slides into the spectrum of the sinister in many other of the book's settings, so the wonder is equally matched, and at times outdone, by the spooky.


Like Star Wars' prequel trilogy, the narrative arc becomes about the antagonist as its his slowly revealed history that frames the narrative and motivates the Chowbar Society's desperate investigations. This antagonist's similarities to the first book also place them as a shade too arch, more of a Freddy Kruger entity, nightmarish, complete with a boiler (for real). This final unveiling nearly undermines all the exotic delight and panoply of characters the book otherwise has. And in this strength alone, Zafón could easily write a series of Chowbar Society stories, the construct is so winning, but we only get this one.

The Watcher in the Shadows

Of the three, this mostly resembles his adult works, which makes sense as he wrote it last. Zafón again departs from his Catalanes setting into nearby Normandy, France.

With many similarities to Prince, we follow a family with even more unfortunate circumstances to a small coastal town where widow Simone takes a household managing post for an eccentric genius toymaker, as her children Irene & Dorian adjust to their new home nearby.

Zafón delivers yet another wonderful mansion setting full of spooky automata, but laced with pathos:

"As she listened to the toymaker’s words, Irene realised she would no longer be able to view Cravenmoore as the magnificent product of a boundless imagination, the ultimate expression of the genius that had created it. Having learned to recognise the emptiness of her own loss, she knew this place to be little more than the dark reflection of the solitude that had overwhelmed Lazarus during the past twenty years. Every piece of that marvellous world was a silent tear." [p.23]

And if you're reading Mists as we were for its connection to The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, Andreas Corelli gets mentioned in passing, and so the tie-in (two books later!) is finally revealed. Also the villain's nature more closely ties this third installment in with Mist but less so with Midnight.

As far as connections that make this a trilogy, the ability to "shadow" in the Zafóniverse results in similar adversaries in all three, and the Faustian bargaining exhibited in The Angel's Game strikes the same chord through these books. In both trilogies Zafón persistently explores the sins-of-the-father, and the quest of the innocent to both uncover & escape the horrors of generations past. The cost of doing so is always that same innocence.

[Zafón is the man!]

Not as complex, not as ornate, but one can see the formative merits as Zafón cuts his chops in this earlier material and the building of the writing to come. The comparison of earlier to later books is perhaps unfair as these are intended for a younger audience, but given the aforementioned fishhook, adults will be compelled to pick them up just to see if the later story seeds from The Mists Trilogy. Yet one can easily imagine that if Zafón had incubated these awhile longer & re-drafted, they very well might have had the same impact as his adult literature.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

dare you enter The Cemetery of Forgotten Books ... ?

We eagerly return to the Zafóniverse, a Gothic Barcelona founded upon secrets, unspeakable war tragedies, and mysterious legends, fueled by an unending hunger of Catalonian delectables, set in unforgettable residences, with a cast tossed about by masterfully plotted waves of hopeless hopes, impossible loves, and dark circumstances.

Yes, we are so bookdrunk on another double draught of Carlos Ruiz Zafón, this time the finishing two installments of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books trilogy.

[The Cemetery of Forgotten Books?
No, it's The Library of Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.]

The Angel's Game (2008) proves to be an illuminating prequel to The Shadow of the Wind (2001). Our young boy main character adjusts from Daniel Sempere to David Martin, who have similar voices, both having lost their mothers to tragic circumstances, and a narrative difference being that David much more fearlessly says what intelligent Daniel only has the insight to think, perhaps because David loses his father far earlier and then feels he has nothing to lose. In most instances this gives the dialogue a winningly zippy Tracy-Hepburn delivery, especially in his later "His Girl Friday" repartee with equally sassy assistant Isabella.

Adolescent David gets a chance to pen a Gothic potboiler, The City of the Damned, serialized on the back page of the newspaper he runs copy for, and it becomes a runaway hit, earning the adoration of the common reader and the scorn of the city's classicist green-eyed literati. Like the eponymous cursed book in The Shadow of the Wind, Zafón's compelling description of this serial makes one want to read this book within a book with its Feuillade's "Les Vampire" (1915 silent serial film) criminal stylings. David's success launches him into the pleasures & perils of authorship, and gains him the attention of an enigmatic would-be patron. (Cue suspense theme.)

When this plot thickens, David's opportunity's for publishing increases, and the novel takes on the larger meaning within the craft & process of writing a book. Zafón's world posits that books serve as vessels of persona & purpose, just as equal as the soul is to the body.

AG also boldly holds forth on religious faith & its invisible constructs, the story-church/chicken-egg causality, whether it's made from a historical messiah figure, or verisimilitudinal legend, or fill-in for a current societal need (almost an unintended comparative to L. Ron Hubbard's Scientology).

Whether commenting on the necessity of religion, the horror of civil war, or the glories of past architectures, Zafón adorns his ideas with a poetic hyperbole and a challenging exploration that is nothing short of transportive. We enjoy the peoples and city walks of bygone days, a fallen elegance that one thought gone but is held in the amber of Zafón's words.

One grim aspect that Zafón endows David's story with is that betrayal is the easy shadow cast by friendship as people turn out to be not what they steadfastly seemed, which makes for surprising (and woeful) reading.

AG also seems to contain a self-aware critique of the Gothic's tropes' effect on the reader, like Northanger Abbey (1817) -- but of course without all of Austen's ploddingly unreadable Regency twaddle. When David selects a long abandoned gargoyle crowned mansion to live in, the manse's dark charms are a dream come true to the writer's fevered imagination, yet as events progress, the house weighs heavy on its resident and possibly colours how he sees things happening to him. Yet the occult forces that are hinted in small details in SotW begin to be revealed, and plunges the book from noir mystery to seriously dark historical fantasy.

Between these last two books is The Rose of Fire, a small 2.5 short story installment that explains the mysterious medieval origins of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books!

But while AG takes it off the map into the unknown in an amazing way, The Prisoner of Heaven (2011) tells you the journey is a lie.

PoH Takes place after SotW, unlike the prequel placement of AG. While a forward states that The Cemetery of Forgotten Books series can be read in any order, in retrospect it unfolds best in order of publication as the third would definitely spoil aspects of the second.

The third installment picks up Daniel Sempere as main character, revealing bookstore clerk & bon vivant Fermín Romero de Torres' story and its consequences.

Fermín's nested flashback narrative honors Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) with a transposition of Zafon's characters which it makes no bones about reframing, but it's a long prison sentence of 82 pages out of 278 for the reader, and some may have hoped that having Prisoner in the title might have proved less literal.

PoH seems to retract the supernature of both SotW & AG as we find David Martin in prison, deluded & dialoging with his more-than-mysterious patron. This turn feels like a cheat that deflates as opposed to a quantum truth, and in questioning his own second novel's decisions Zafón undermines the darkly numinous occult forces in his world.

Zafón plays with the unreliable narrator which later comes across as a slight abuse of the reader/author compact. Yet it partly doesn't matter since by the time he unveils that trick's mechanics his story's momentum far outweighs most misgivings one might have for such an implied illusion versus reality twist. (And if the occult is unseen and the spiritual invisible, then there isn't a paradox to complain about -- but that's a semi-apologetic comfort this reviewer had to come up with, not the author.) Still, we feel this implied retraction shouldn't be there at all, that such a move feels cowardly, and this is our one large complaint about these otherwise brilliant books.

Not that a visual adaptation needs to even be made as the literary medium does quite well on its own, but if Zafón's work were serialized into a series, one would want the Russian network to give it a "The Master & Margarita" treatment. Or, if major motion picture, maybe best put in the hands of Guillermo Del Toro, who's Hispanic sensibilities would do the work's sinister mood justice.

Like an Alfred Hitchcock cameo, Zafón passingly references himself in the side character of Professor Alburquerque:

"‘You should write a book on the subject,’ I proposed. ‘A secret history of Barcelona seen through its accursed writers, those forbidden in the official version.’ The professor considered the idea, intrigued. [...]

‘You’d better, because cities have no memory and they need someone like me, a sage with his feet on the ground, to keep it alive.’" [p.211]

In this goal, Zafón succeeds. Dickens is to London as Zafón is to Barcelona, and that will be his immortal legacy that cheats death, the towering monolith that looms largest in the haunted center of The Cemetery of Forgotten Books.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

beware of the book.

There are points as readers where a text involves us, that thing we hold & read with intimate exploration interacts with us, and when we reach the end we are hopefully dazzled enough to wish it were more than just a book, and if successful, made to feel as if it really is.

But what if that pleasurable book were truly more? A malevolency lying in wait for you to open it? Something that meant to harm you, a thing with a life & sentience of its own? Yet, bibliophile that you are, you cannot resist turning the page ... .

From Chambers' mysterious French play, The King in Yellow, where once read a slow otherworldly incursion happens into reality, to the infamous Necronomicon, Lovecraft's forbidden tome that drives its reader mad with secrets man was never meant to know, three other cursed objets du nuit insidiously inch forward from shelves lurking probably very near you:

[Bookcraft by Zarono.]

Most are familiar with Arturo Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas (1993) from Roman Polanski's wonderfully satanic film adaptation "The Ninth Gate" (2000). While this is heretical for a literati to say, the ending on "The Ninth Gate" was more satisfying. One of course follows the other, and media comparatives' main objection was Polanski's disposal of the clever parallel literary metaplot because there really wasn't a way to carry that into a film, but in the book it backhands the reader, then kicks them in the face while they're down. (In a "yes, more please" way.)

The book within this book is The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows penned & printed by Aristide Torchia, in Venice (1666), pursued by unscrupulous book detective Richard Corso at the behest of sinister collector Varo Borja. The descriptions of libraries and their contents are nothing short of pornographic for the literarily inclined:

"He looked around at the books on the walls, at their dark, worn spines, and he seemed to hear a strange, distant murmur coming from them. Each of the closed books was a door, and behind it stirred shadows, voices, sounds, heading toward him from a deep, dark place.” (p. 246)

And like Corso, we are lured into finding out if The Nine Gates is just a forgery, or if it is the real deal ... .


Clive Barker's Mister B. Gone (2007) stands as the shortest and most direct of these three. Like a CYOA novel, or a Lemony Snicket ASOUE self-referential offering, the book from the get-go implores you to stop reading, put the book down, and just burn it before you come to a bad end. Which of course makes one want to keep reading. Comical in tone, yet visceral & tragic in parts, the book's own first-person narrator cajoles, threatens, begs, tempts, and bribes you, the reader, to destroy it ... before it somehow destroys you. While this book wasn't as literary as the other two, Barker's conceit is very clever, and he stays an intuitive step ahead of the reader with his living paper vessel in answering their unspoken questions about just what it is they might have gotten themselves in contact with.


Why one would wait nearly a decade & a half before reading The Shadow of the Wind is a question we hope to spare you, and are still beating ourselves up over. This Barcelona lovesong from 2001 is gothic noir at its most exceptional:

"'Didn't Julian have any brothers or sisters?'

The caretaker shrugged her shoulders and let out a sigh. 'I heard rumours that she miscarried once because of the beatings her husband gave her, but I don't know. People love to gossip, don't they? But not me. All I know is that once Julian told the other kids in the building that he had a sister only he could see. He said she came out of mirrors as if she were made of thin air and that she lived with Satan himself in a palace at the bottom of a lake. My Isabelita had nightmares for a whole month. That child could be really morbid at times.'" (p.119)

When young Daniel Sempere comes into possession of the eponymous The Shadow of the Wind, a dark nightmarish smoke scented stranger materializes in pursuit of what may be the last copy of this rare book.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón's dreamlike prose persists like a fog that won't lift, perfectly flowing, only to reveal the hint of a shadowy secret that implies the truth is far larger than one can comprehend. The plot takes our heroes into unavoidable damned-if-you-do investigations and they're swept along by inevitable consequences. The past & present dog all the characters, who're chewed upon by bittersweet yearnings & unrealized desires, only to fulfill them for a golden moment, which is then lost to circumstance. The book is a vault of dark magic that once unlocked will plunge you into its story, willing or no.


We drink the harmful, we smoke the cancerous, we love the undeserving, and we read the forbidden, because we cannot help ourselves. Enjoy & beware, unguarded readers.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.