The Angel's Game

Like David, Cristina Sagnier relies on the patronage of Pedro Vidal from an early age. Her father, Manuel, is Pedro's driver, and Cristina is his assistant. She is described by David as "a creature of pale skin and well-defined lips who was a couple years older than me and had taken my breath away ever since I saw her the first time Vidal invited me to visit Villa Helius" (27).

Cristina marries Pedro out of a sense of indebtedness and obligation despite her love for David. She explains to David, "Because our lives don't belong to us. Not mine, not my father's, not yours" (134). Soul-sick by her marriage to a man she doesn't love, Cristina attempts to commit suicide by overdosing on laudanum. Shortly thereafter, Pedro lets her go, and Cristina returns to David, but their reunion is short-lived. Cristina reads David's manuscript and begins to lose her mind as she battles Corelli's attempts to take her soul. She only submits to Corelli when David, in his vanity and cowardice, refuses to burn the manuscript. Cristina ends her life—likely at Corelli's bidding—by falling into a frozen lake. Before she falls, she smiles and tells David she loves him.

Andreas Corelli is a publisher who makes a Faustian offer to cure David's brain tumor if he writes him a manuscript that will serve as the basis of a new religion. Middle-aged with white hair and long fingernails, Corelli is all but confirmed to a human incarnation of Satan. This interpretation is supported by the angel iconography that surrounds him, signifying the tale of the fallen angel Lucifer, who is cast down to the underworld for seeking heaven's highest seat. Corelli frequently engages with David about the power of fiction narratives to draw humanity into madness and violence. He believes this is a natural consequence of human biology, which he is all too happy to exploit.

While it is suggested on numerous occasions that David and Corelli are the same person, other characters are said to interact with Corelli independently. That said, David is such an unreliable narrator that it is possible these interactions are simply products of David's fevered, psychotic imagination.

Pedro Vidal is the star writer and one of the wealthy owners of The Voice of Industry, the newspaper where David starts his career. He is described as having "the looks and the manner of a matinee idol: fair hair always well combed, a pencil moustache, and the easy, generous smile of someone who feels comfortable in his own skin and at ease with the world" (5). Pedro takes pity on David after his father is murdered by gunmen. The gunmen mistake David's father for Pedro, who had an affair with the gunmen's boss. Pedro doesn't tell David this until many years later.

Later, Pedro's relationship with David is further strained when he marries Cristina. The two reconcile at the end of the novel when Pedro helps hide David from the authorities. David lies to Pedro and says Cristina is alive and awaiting David's arrival in Paris. After David leaves, Pedro kills himself with a gunshot to the head.

Diego Marlasca is a lawyer who in 1904 accepts an offer from Corelli to write a religious tract in exchange for the return of his son, who drowned in a pool. Unable to complete his manuscript without losing his mind, Marlasca seeks protection from Corelli from a witch. He kills Detective Ricardo Salvador in a Satanic ritual that allows him to overtake Salvador's body and soul as a way to hide from Corelli. He reemerges 25 years later to steal David's manuscript and deliver it to Corelli in hopes of finally getting his son back. In a confrontation, David overpowers and kills Marlasca.

Isabella Gispert is a 17-year-old aspiring writer whom David takes under his wing as his assistant and mentee. When David first sees her, he describes her as "a frightened fawn" (121). David and Isabella share a faintly flirtatious though adversarial relationship that boils over when David discovers Isabella hid dozens of letters written to him by Isabella.

According to a letter David receives at the end of the novel, Isabella marries Sempere's son and has a child, Daniel, with him. She dies of cholera near the end of the Spanish Civil War.

Sempere is a kindly bookseller who gives David books to read as a youth. A surrogate father figure, Sempere also introduces David to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. At one point, he tells David, "Sometimes I think you should have been my son" (320). He dies of a heart attack while trying to protect The Steps of Heaven—David's book, which Sempere believes contains his soul—from Irene Sabido.