He says: 'Now I want to live like everybody else. "If I am to be saved it is because your love redeems me."Įrik agrees to give her two weeks to get her life together before she moves into his creepy basement apartment, so long as Christine promises to come back and marry him and deliver him from his sad, lonely life. "If I am the phantom, it is because man's hatred has made me so," he says. He wants her love to make up for all the hatred he's endured. Erik immediately freaks out and demands to keep Christine forever as his bride now that she's seen him unmasked.
Erik also kidnaps Christine to his underground lair, where she hangs for a bit before she yanks off his mask. The managers refuse to pay up, so Erik drops that famous chandelier, killing a member of the audience. Erik is also obsessed with rope tricks, weird mirrors, and ventriloquism, since I guess turning his back on human society has left him with a lot of time on his hands.
#The phantom of the opera book full#
Leroux's Phantom wears a full face mask to hide his face, which Christine describes as looking like a skull or a "death's head" (his costume was changed to a half-mask for the musical so that the actor could actually use his mouth for singing). Naturally, Christine's Angel is revealed to be none other than the Phantom himself, a musical genius named Erik, who lives deep in the bowels of the opera house. Plus, some mysterious Phantom is threatening the Opera's managers, demanding money and a promotion for Christine. But Christine is being all weird and vague about her new music teacher, who she claims is the Angel of Music. She's a tremendous success, and her old childhood playmate, Raoul, realizes that he now has the hots for her. A sweet young ingénue, Christine Daaé, is called upon to sing when the Opera's leading soprano falls ill. You probably know the basics of the story already. The Phantom of the Operaby Gaston LeRoux, $17, Amazon And if you're looking for cheesy synth music, or a true masterpiece of horror, or groundbreaking storytelling, then you should look to one of the many, many Phantom adaptions.īut if you're looking for an odd little book that surprisingly defies its own time and place in its discussion of male violence and entitlement, then maybe give Leroux a chance. It's also a toxic mess of gender and race stereotypes and unhealthy romantic tropes, as so many "classic" love stories are. It's still one of my shameful, secret favorite books. I mean, don't get me wrong, The Phantom of the Opera is a ton of fun, especially if you love dark and brooding monster boyfriends (which I do). And, to be honest, it's a pretty schlocky Gothic romance. So Leroux cooked up an Opera Ghost responsible for all this weirdness, and turned it into a serialized novel, Le Fantôme de l'Opéra. There was also the true story of the time that the grand chandelier's counterweight fell through the ceiling, killing a construction worker. Leroux was inspired by the rumors that swirled around the old Paris Opera: there were tales of an enormous lake hidden under the building's foundation (it was really a covered water tank), of a ballet dancer's skeleton being used as set dressing, and of a hidden stash of phonographic recordings deep in the cellar. But before Andrew Lloyd Webber was trapping tourists on Broadway, before Lon Chaney was hamming it up on the silent screen, before the internet was flooded with Erik/Raoul fanfiction, an author named Gaston Leroux sat down to write a mystery novel about a shattered chandelier. That Phantom, the little French story from the early 20th Century that most people know through its countless, way more popular adaptations. The one with the singing and the mask and the sick electric guitar sting.
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