Works of art are not required to have a point. When the adult Zachary reaches this wondrous realm via a literary party at the Algonquin Club, he becomes enmeshed in a lethal battle to save the Starless Sea from destruction. This portal would have led him to the Starless Sea, a labyrinthine underground repository of stories embedded in paper, ribbons, skin, funeral shrouds and candies, to name a few media. (One does not forget.) A mysterious book Zachary discovers relates not only fairy tales, but a story about Zachary himself as a boy and a magical painted door he left unopened. All three of Zachary Ezra Rawlins’s names march forth at the outset of every chapter in which he is featured, in case one forgets he is the hero. “The Starless Sea,” conversely, is an abstruse series of fragmented fables, interspersed with the saga of a present-day grad student who is a voracious reader and connoisseur of retro cocktails. It is a simple and timeless plot: As William Goldman puts it in “The Princess Bride,” “True love is the best thing in the world, except for cough drops.”

Their forced competition, in direct opposition to their passion, earned Morgenstern weeks on the New York Times best-seller list, a movie deal and the hearts of readers in 37 languages. Speaking of Juliet and her Romeo, the central characters of “The Night Circus,” Celia and her Marco, are pitted against each other in a magical duel, but ultimately fall in love. Morgenstern catapulted to international fame with her 2011 phantasmagorical hit “ The Night Circus,” in which a community calling themselves rêveurs (dreamers) follow a magical circus.

Unfortunately for Erin Morgenstern and her sophomore offering, “The Starless Sea,” it is not an ideal subject for a novel - or at least, not for this one. This is a beautiful succession, and an admirable topic for an essay on Joseph Campbell or a San Diego Comic Con panel regarding Stan Lee. The wide-eyed wonder of a child reading with a flashlight under the covers leads to the adult passion for spinning narrative from nothing. Francis Ford Coppola won the Palme d’Or by transplanting “ Heart of Darkness” to Vietnam in “ Apocalypse Now.” Neil Gaiman gorgeously reimagined “The Jungle Book” with ghosts replacing wild animals in “ The Graveyard Book.” If these fail to impress, consider that “Romeo and Juliet” is actually Ovid’s tale of Pyramus and Thisbe from the “Metamorphoses,” which was itself based on an even more ancient etiological myth. Pastiche (alternately, homage or fan fiction) is a venerable genre.

The Anathema by Zachary Rawlins