This book was awesome!

The Prince of Mist by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

Having had another of Carlos Ruiz Zafon's books recommended to me (The Shadow of the Wind), I figured that since I enjoyed that so much I would give The Prince of Mist a try. And I was not disappointed... This author has an uncanny way of sucking the reader into his stories, and his way of describing places and people makes the reader feel as if they are actually a part of the action. I didn't realise that the story had a clown in it - and I am kind of phobic when it comes to clowns ('thanks' Stephen King's horror novel It...) but the novel is meant to be somewhat creepy and it does achieve that end.

The novel begins when Max Carver's father - a watchmaker and inventor - decides to move to a small town on the Atlantic Coast. They move into a house that was built for a surgeon, Dr Richard Fleischmann and his wife but was abandoned when the couple's son drowned in a tragic accident. Behind the house Max spies an overgrown garden full of statues surrounded by a metal fence topped with a six-pointed star. When he goes to investigate, Max finds that the statues seem to consist of a a kind of circus troup. In the centre of the garden is a large statue of a clown set in another six-pointed star.Max has the curious sensation that the statue is beckoning to him. As the family settles in they become increasingly uneasy: they discover a box of old films belonging to the Fleischmanns. His sister Alicia has unsettling dreams and his other sister hears voices whispering to her from an old wardrobe. But Max spends most of his time with his new friend Roland, who takes him diving to the wreck of a boat that sank close to the coast in a terrible storm. Everyone on board perished except for one man - an engineer who built the lighthouse at the end of the beach. During the dive, Max sees something that leaves him cold - on the mast floats a tattered flag and on it is the symbol of the circle and six-pointed star. As they learn more about the wreck, the chilling story of a legendary figure called the Prince of Mist begins to emerge.