Check out this sentence from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s best-seller “The Angel’s Game”: “I went through the front door feeling as if I was entering the jaws of a being made of stone and shadow and ascended the wide staircase, penetrating the bowels of this creature; when I opened the door of the main floor, the long corridor that faded into darkness seemed, for the first time, like the antechamber of a poisoned and distrustful mind.”

Now add a string of these metaphor-heavy, exaggeratedly gothic sentences together until they compose a book. Make them weave an intricate plot with twists and turns that come out of nowhere and you’ve got “The Angel’s Game.”

“The Angel’s Game,” released in mid-June, takes the concept of purple prose to a higher level, making the book tiresome instead of atmospheric, which is what Zafón seems to be striving for.

Set in Barcelona in the 1920s, “The Angel’s Game” tells the story of a young writer named David Martin. Martin begins writing for a newspaper before churning out sensationalist “penny dreadfuls” about the underworld of Barcelona called “City of the Damned.” Flashbacks of Martin’s troubled childhood are injected intermittently.

150 pages later comes the main storyline, however. Martin literally makes a lucrative book deal with the devil, receiving a huge amount of money and the cure for his fatal brain cancer (which, strangely, is barely referred to). And while this twist could have been interesting, Martin’s naivety during the process is frustrating.

“The Angel’s Game” plods on, introducing more and more minor characters as it progresses. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between characters because it seems that all of them have the same sarcastic personality. While this formula sometimes makes for humorous dialogue, the constant sarcasm and bitterness also gets tiresome.

The romantic subplot also has its problems. The narrator’s love interest, Cristina, is never shown to have any redeeming qualities, nor is given much of a personality. And seeing that Martin appears to forget about her for long stretches of pages at a time, his so-called obsession with her feels forced.

But the book is still a best-seller, right? It can’t be all bad, can it?

OK, there might be a few reasons for the book’s success. “The Angel’s Game” is the second installment of Zafón’s gothic Barcelona world.

The first, “The Shadow of the Wind,” was also a best-seller. While “The Angel’s Game” is not a sequel or prequel, but merely a supplement, some of its popularity could be gleaned from this previous work.

The premise of “The Angel’s Game” is also, admittedly, an interesting one. If the book was perhaps severely cut down and trimmed up, it could have been saved.

Sadly, the book’s foundation gets overshadowed by the ornate descriptions, overly obscure plot and uninteresting large cast of characters.

And all this, oddly, from “one of the world’s most read and best-loved writers,” claims Zafón’s biography on the back flap.

-Megan Morgan is a professional writing senior.