Reviewed by Bill Sheehan

Carlos Ruiz Zafon acquired a large following and an international reputation with The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game, big, baroque novels set in a hyper-real Barcelona filled with mystery, romance, intrigue, and a host of Gothic flourishes. At their deepest level, they are books about the enduring importance of books, of stories themselves, and their appeal has been virtually universal. The Prince of Mist, Zafon’s latest English language publication, is a different kind of book entirely. Spare, straightforward, and sharply focused, its pleasures are simpler and more modest, though no less real for all that.

In a brief introduction, Zafon notes that The Prince of Mist was, in fact, his first novel, and was published in his native Spain in 1992. It is one of four early novels whose American publication has been delayed due to an unspecified “legal dispute” that has finally been resolved. Zafon also notes that all four books were aimed at, though not restricted to, a younger audience. With that distinction in mind, let me begin by saying that The Prince of Mist succeeds admirably in transcending the artificial marketing category called “YA Fiction.” Like Neil Gaiman in The Graveyard Book and Ursula K. LeGuin in her Earthsea novels, Zafon has written a heartfelt, deeply absorbing story that readers of all ages and types are sure to enjoy.

The story takes place in June of 1943, when World War II is raging and a climate of uncertainty dominates the world. Its opening sentence perfectly sets the tone for the narrative that will follow: “Max would never forget that faraway summer when, almost by chance, he discovered magic.” Max is thirteen-year-old Max Carver, son of Maximilian Carver, watchmaker, inventor, and eccentric. As the story begins, Max, together with his parents and two sisters, is preparing to move from his home in an unnamed city to a country retreat far from the furor of the endless, ongoing War. When they reach their new home, ominous signs begin, almost immediately, to appear. Statues change–or seem to change–position. A sinister cat insinuates itself into the family circle. Time itself behaves strangely, literally moving in reverse. The house, they discover, has a tragic history whose echoes continue to reverberate.

The Carvers have barely settled in when Irina, Max’s younger sister, suffers an inexplicable “accident” that leaves her comatose. At about this time, Max and his older sister Alicia encounter two new figures that will play central roles in an astonishing–and ancient–supernatural drama. The first is Roland, an attractive teenager who shows the Carvers the local sights, the most significant of which is a sunken ship with a tragic history of its own. The second is Victor Kray, Roland’s adoptive grandfather. Victor is a kind of sentry, a perennial Watcher who mans the nearby lighthouse. He is also the keeper of the secret story that stands at the heart of the novel. That story reaches back into Victor’s own past and encompasses the mysterious sunken ship, the forces that caused Irina’s accident, the impossible moving statues, and the actual history of the Carver’s new home. All of these elements are tied together by an enigmatic figure named Cain, also known as The Prince of Mist.

On its most fundamental level, Zafon’s novel is a lively, thoroughly modern retelling of one of the essential narratives of Western Civilization: the Faustian Compact, which can be summed up in a single sentence: Take what you want–and pay for it. In Zafon’s version, Cain is the architect of a devil’s bargain that plays itself out over a period of years, culminating in a hallucinatory, storm-tossed climax in which the Carvers. Roland, and Victor Kray play critical–and inescapable–roles. The result is a dark, modestly proportioned tale that gives us an invaluable glimpse of a major talent in the early stages of his development. Aided immeasurably by Lucia Graves’s crystalline English rendering, The Prince of Mist is more than a mere historical curiosity. It is a work of the creative imagination that should appeal to hardcore Zafon fans, younger readers with a budding taste for the macabre, and anyone searching for a well-crafted narrative clearly and cleanly told.