The Angel’s Game
By Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Translated by Lucia Graves
Weidenfeld & Nicholson £18.99, 448 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón has taken eight years to follow up his million-selling debut, The Shadow of the Wind. Perhaps understandably, he has stuck to the same territory by writing a “semi-prequel” to the first book, set in dark, bloody, 1920s Barcelona.

In The Angel’s Game, the narrator is David Martín, a young literary aspirant, orphaned as a teen. Fiction is his preferred reality, and he spends his youth devouring Dickens among the dusty shelves of Sempere & Sons Bookshop. Encouraged by Sempere, and Pedro Vidal, patron of the evening paper where he helps pen the crime blotter, he churns out a series of penny dreadfuls called “City of the Damned”.

The novel’s gothicism shifts into high gear when David acquires a long-abandoned tower house in Barcelona’s ancient Ribera district. An eerie presence in its empty rooms begins to invade his mind. Toiling in the gloom by night, in love with the woman Vidal has married, he is on the verge of collapse.

When a mysterious Parisian publisher offers a Faustian bargain of a book advance, Zafón knowingly observes David’s writerly travails – caffeine-fuelled scribblings, fits of self-doubt. What follow is a delicious blend of literary thriller and romance.

Zafón is a master of the atmospheric; his Barcelona is a city wrought in red and black, all crimson skies and clouds of ash. Though he reuses a key feature of his first book, The Cemetery of Forgotten Books,he does so successfully, exploring the labyrinthine library of discontinued volumes through David’s eyes.

As he walks through the cemetery, he says: “I let myself be imbued with the smell, with the light that filtered through the cracks or from the glass lanterns embedded in the wooden structure, floating among mirrors and shadows.”

At times the candlelight and creaking hinges come on too strong, and as the novel nears its end, it spirals into Grand Guignol. But its faith in the power of fiction is endearing, and addictive.

Zoë Slutzky is an assistant editor at The Hudson Review