The Angel's Game

The Prequel’s Darker Register

The Angel’s Game is the second novel in Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s Cemetery of Forgotten Books series but chronologically precedes The Shadow of the Wind — set in 1920s Barcelona, a generation before Daniel Sempere’s postwar story. Its protagonist is David Martín, a young journalist-turned-novelist who grew up in poverty and has clawed his way to modest literary recognition writing popular serial fiction for a newspaper. He lives alone in a crumbling tower house in the Ravel district, a building with its own dark history, and he writes with the furious, isolated discipline of someone who has no other way to survive.

The story turns when David receives an extraordinary commission from a publisher named Andreas Corelli, who offers a fortune for a single book: a work capable of giving people a new religion, something to believe in. The commission is Faustian in the precise sense — David accepts it knowing something is wrong, driven by desperation and ambition, and what follows is the novel’s central horror: the discovery of what belief does when it is manufactured rather than found.

Architecture as Conspiracy

Where The Shadow of the Wind used Barcelona’s architecture atmospherically — the city as gothic backdrop — The Angel’s Game makes the city’s geography actively conspiratorial. David’s tower house, the winding streets of the Ravel, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books itself: these spaces are not merely described but implicated. The city’s physical layers encode its layers of history and concealment. Zafón’s Barcelona is a place where the stones remember what the living prefer to forget.

The novel is more explicitly Gothic than its predecessor — more willing to raise the question of whether its sinister forces are genuinely supernatural or merely the projections of a writer whose mind is deteriorating under pressure. The ambiguity is sustained with considerable skill, but it shifts the register from the romantic mystery of The Shadow of the Wind toward something colder and more disturbing.

Literature as Power

The novel’s central preoccupation — what a book that made people believe anything would actually be — is more philosophically ambitious than anything in the first book. Zafón is asking a serious question about the relationship between narrative, belief, and manipulation, and the historical context of 1920s Europe (with fascism rising, old certainties collapsing) gives the question specific weight. The books in the Cemetery of Forgotten Books are forgotten because someone wanted them forgotten; the book David is commissioned to write is meant to be believed because someone needs believers.

This makes The Angel’s Game a more intellectually demanding novel than The Shadow of the Wind, though arguably less satisfying as pure story. Its mysteries are less neatly resolved, its protagonist less easy to love. But within the Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, it deepens the mythology significantly — and its portrait of a writer trapped by his own creation is among Zafón’s most haunting achievements.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Darker, more Gothic, and more philosophically ambitious than its predecessor, The Angel’s Game uses the prequel structure to ask what literature is actually for — and the answer is unsettling.