Review of 'The Watcher in the Shadows' by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I picked this up almost by accident; I was stuck outside for a few hours with nothing to read, and miraculously one of the charity shops was open, and it felt safe to go inside (almost my first time inside a shop for weeks), and I recognised the author and didn't feel like picking up and touching a lot of other books till I found one that I liked better. I'd quite liked The Shadow of the Wind, and been less keen on The Angel's Game.

A little way in I realised that this was a "young adults" book, and also something he wrote years ago, before he was a success. It's a bit cliched, and there were bits of description that were a chore to read. Nevertheless you can see that he knows how to tell a story and to maintain tension, even when the story itself is a bit nonsensical...it relies on supernatural elements that are grounded in a unfamiliar and unstated supernatural universe. I mean, if you read something that's basically Christian, with a Devil and Hell, and demons and so on, you know where you are. Here that's not the case - there's a horrid evil at the heart of the story, but we don't understand where it comes from or what are the rules by which it works.

I note in passing that the story is set in the 1930s, and that in an afternote there are references to the war - and some of the backstory narrative is set in 1916, though there are only the darkest of hints about the war that was going on then. But at one point in the story the characters find themselves in a a large disused shower room, and something nasty comes out of the shower heads. I couldn't help but find that objectionable...it's obviously drawing on the reality of the fake showers in the Nazi concentration camps, but this felt to me like exploitation rather than explication.

In an afterword the author explains that it's a work aimed at young adults around 13 years of age, and he cites Jules Verne, Victor Hugo and Enid Blyton as the sort of thing he thinks his target audience is reading...which seems odd to me. Is anyone reading Enid Blyton by the time they are 13? And reading Victor Hugo as well?