The Phantom Library

There are novels that make you say, “What the hell is this book?” multiple times during reading. This is one of those novels.

 

The first credit in the dedication of this book is to "my Angel of Writing, the spirit of Erik, who guided me through every word of every chapter in my labor of love and to whom I have given part of my soul through this work." I thought this might be about to suggest some kind of astral or time-travel shenanigans and was proven wrong, which is hilarious if you picture my face when I later read Meadows’ other book. The dedication goes on to make it pretty clear that the book is based on Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical, which she thanks for seeing Leroux’s novel “in its true light”. Assuming Leroux had somehow been way less romantic and meaningful than he meant to be in his book and that Lloyd Webber had “fixed” it was a bizarrely popular interpretation in the late eighties and early nineties and led to some truly terrible writing as a result, but we can’t go around punishing everyone for Forsyth’s mistakes, so on we go.

 

It’s also pretty funny that the author’s husband and children made the dedication… but only in sixth and seventh place, after Sarah Brightman and Michael Crawford (who originated the roles of Christine and the Phantom in the Lloyd Webber musical, respectively), Andrew Lloyd Webber, “all who believe”, and the fictional character of Erik. Leroux did not make the dedication at all, except to be obliquely scolded by comparing his novel to Lloyd Webber’s interpretation of it.

 

In thanking the volunteer editor for the book, it is revealed that there was, in fact, an editor. This mostly serves to point out how very, very badly most writers need professional editors in order to make their work readable. I am unable to imagine what this must have looked like before it was edited, even by a volunteer editor. I hope this editor drank a lot.

 

Prologue: Christine

 

This little prologue doesn't include much action; Christine is looking for her son, Christian, in the garden, and the kid is running around chasing an "angel". His mother does a dramatic half-swoon when he repeats this to her (don’t worry, this is just a warm-up swoon for the rest of the novel) and then rhapsodizes ecstatically in her internal monologue on how much this reminds her of Erik, god rest his soul. Yes, we are in a sequel, so one would assume he is dead... except that, you know, he's apparently playing patty-cake with Christine's kid in the garden. She goes on to think about how deep her love is, and how much she wishes their souls were intertwined, which is a bit concerning since she appears to be married to Raoul and raising a family with him after having escaped Erik's clutches.

 

Christine's inability to put two and two together when it comes to her kid playing with a mysterious black shape that he calls an "angel" is but the first incident in a titanic series of ostensibly reasonably observant people being totally unable to figure out obvious basic truths. This is one of those plots where any thinking whatsoever would destroy the entire thing and therefore thinking is Banned and only for the Unromantic. The fun has only just begun.

 

It's worth noting that the name Christian, while not particularly original, is still a good choice for Christine's son. It emphasizes not only his link to her but also suggests him as a second Christ figure, which is good because Christine completely drops the ball on that in this novel.

 

Book 1: Christian

 

Chapter 1:

 

The novel is divided into several books, which isn’t uncommon in longer pieces of fiction. Given that Meadows shamelessly steals material from Susan Kay’s 1990 novel throughout her book, I’m guessing she also borrowed that particular convention. Unfortunately, where Kay’s “books” were self-contained parts of the story, Meadows’ books have only one purpose, and that is letting her switch points of view. It’s not the worst idea to have definitive cuts when you’re changing point of view, but often there isn’t any plot-compelling reason to switch to another character at a particular time, and since every single character’s point of view is written in exactly the same style and voice, sometimes you have to wonder why she bothered. I frequently forgot whether a scene was from the point of view of Christian, Christine, Erik, or Madeleine, because they all sound exactly the same.

 

Our first scene in the book proper is a repeat of the one from the prologue and involves the young Christian, apparently a vocal and piano-playing prodigy, chasing a mysterious masked man into the opera house cellars after he catches him lingering about his dressing room after a performance. The Phantom apparently has no physical negatives whatsoever except for the face under the mask, by which I mean Meadows really, really wants us to know how hot he is. His appearance is so handsome as to be jaw-dropping, and he is often described with hilarious adjectives such as "robust". A very far cry from Leroux's skeletal, dank-smelling monster, but Meadows does at least include some vivid description, and her obvious desire to present the Phantom as a kingly figure plays into the idea of his rulership of the underground well.

 

And now for one of many things that made me want to hire a zeppelin to putt about over potential authors' homes with informative corrections on its massive sides: the character's name is Raoul de Chagny. He is from a long line of de Chagnys. The “de” is part of his last name - it basically means “of”, so that his name is Raoul of or from Chagny. Unfortunately, characters, including French aristocrats who would never, keep leaving the first half of his name off and referring to him as “Chagny”, which… is not his name. That would be like referring to someone named McIntyre as just Intyre all the time, or someone named Vandermeer as just Meer. 

 

Once in a while, a character will tease us by saying the entire name correctly, but then everyone goes back to just plain old "Chagny" again. This is the NAME OF ONE OF THE MAIN CHARACTERS.

 

I'm unsure as to whether married ladies kept their previous names in this particular time period and culture, so I'm not sure if "Christine Daae de Chagny" is correct. But what I do know about the time period is that the fact that Raoul and Christine have gotten married and now live right outside of Paris in an idyllic happyland should involve some kind of repercussions or social stigma - it was kind of a big deal in the original novel that he was willing to marry someone so far below his station! - but apparently everyone is okay with the vicomte (wait, sorry; he's a viscount in this... except sometimes, when he's a vicomte instead) marrying an orphaned nobody opera girl, and they still get invited to all the right parties. Philippe would be appalled.

 

Christian apparently has eyes that are "deep brown but mixed with flecks of gold that sparkled..." You'll excuse me while I go try not to asphyxiate laughing at the boy with the glitter-eyes. I know why Meadows is doing that because it is not exactly subtle (but it's a SECRET, so no one will reveal it for TEN THOUSAND MORE CHAPTERS), but that doesn't make it make any more sense. Speaking of said secret, Christian likes to stare into the mirror and wonder why he doesn't look like Daddy. He doesn't even really look like Mommy. Who does he look like? The reading audience sighs deeply and his mother just keels over in a dead faint when he asks her, followed by telling him nothing reassuring. (By the way, what kind of fifteen-year-old asks his mother, "Who do I look like?" What a bizarre question.) 

 

He doesn’t seem very concerned about this question, talking about it in a sort of literary monotone, so it’s something of a surprise to learn that the question apparently "raged in [his] mind and left smoldering embers in [his] soul." Y’all are just getting prepared for the prose in this book.

 

The fun continues when Christian goes back to boarding school and after seeing a bully abusing a stray dog succumbs to some kind of blackout rage in which he beats the boy to within an inch of his life and then completely fails to remember the incident afterward. I can get behind the episode as being inherited from OhWaitI'mNotSupposedToKnowWhoYet - some mental illnesses and personality disorders can have genetic components - but Christian's internal monologue in regards to it is wildly inconsistent. He veers from being shocked and appalled at having hurt someone so badly, even indulging in some compulsive hand-washing to get the blood off, to feeling persecuted that the school's headmaster isn't punishing the half-dead boy like he's being punished (you broke all his ribs and you’re mad that he didn’t get suspended?), to smiling with unholy glee at his own power over life and death. There's intended to be a contrast between Christian's good nature and the evil he's inherited, or something, but it doesn't really work and leaves him very unsympathetic for the reader. 

 

The lazy justification that it was okay to almost kill the dog-kicking kid doesn't fly with me, either - having a throwaway antagonist abuse an animal to show they’re Bad without having to do any work is an ancient cliche and a lazy and cheap one to get an emotional reaction from a reader that the writer didn’t bother to earn. Yeah, of course dog-kicking is bad, but so is beating a fucking kid to death with your fists and then not being very sorry about it later. I see you, Meadows.

 

At any rate, Christian is kicked out of boarding school for almost killing a fellow student (and because he couldn't be spending this book running around opera houses and sewers if he were learning, could he?), and Raoul has to come get his son and take him off to a doctor to see what's wrong with him. Said doctor, despite the very shaky science of genetics in the 1800s, informs Raoul that such blackout rages are known to be hereditary. Christian can't figure out why his father suddenly looks kind of depressed, but I bet I and every other reader still stuck with this book can.

 

There is also much ado about the fact that Christian has black hair, which doesn't match either Christine's brown curls (well, hello there, Ms. Brightman) or Raoul's blonde locks (and you, too, Mr. Barton!). Genetics says this can totally happen, but let's not rain on Meadows' parade too much yet. We have so very far to go.

 

The book is also technically questionable, in case you wondered if at least it wouldn’t be difficult to read. Extra periods leer from the pages, disrupting perfectly good sentences; things are "leveled on" people rather than leveled at them; ellipses march behind my eyelids in a neverending procession. Random, mid-sentence line breaks make paragraphs where no extra paragraphs should be. The homophones are the worst issue; at no point can I take a book seriously in which someone's face turns "beat red", unless the author is trying to communicate that the character's face is red because someone has just punched him in the nose. Similarly, when someone is sporting a "rye smile", I doubt very much that Meadows wanted me to be envisioning the character with a gigantic piece of brown bread plastered butter-side-down to his face. And there's bonus redundancy, too, when people are wearing the "black leg of the trousers of my black evening suit".

 

Chapter 2:

 

Christian's quest to find out the Great Mystery of his origin continues apace, though sadly not apace enough to speed up some painful navel-gazing. My question is this: if the incident in Leroux's book (and Lloyd Webber's musical, too) was so frightening to the Parisian public, and if Christian is actually regularly performing and hanging out at the opera house, how can he not have yet heard about what happened to his mother and father? Both versions of the story play up the idea that performers are notorious gossips, and even if they weren't, how can this kid have gotten to age seventeen without EVER hearing even a WHIMPER of that whole mom-being-kidnapped-by-a-murderer and dad-almost-dying-in-her-defense thing? People died! Shows were disrupted! It was a big deal!

 

In case anyone wondered if the prose was calming down, someone is now crying "a stream of rainbow tears". That someone is not, despite appearances, a unicorn.

 

But there is a positive here in that Meadows uses some of that good old Greek mythology imagery here, referring to Erik with a Hades metaphor. This is one of the classic metaphors used to refer to the Phantom, who represents a ruling force in a dark, shadowy realm (and, in his original death's-headed murderous form, has more than a passing relation to the concept of death) and who abducts a beautiful young representative of sunshine and growth (Christine, standing in for Persephone) to be his wife. It's nice to see it represented here, even if it doesn’t go anywhere much past a nod.

 

Now Christine is wandering the shore of the lake beneath the opera house, alone, at night, in the complete darkness without any kind of extra light source, shouting forlornly about how much she misses Erik and wants to see his ghost. Unfortunately for us, she somehow fails to fall in and drown or otherwise meet her end doing this ridiculous nonsense, so we're stuck with her for another 375 pages. Her son is understandably confused and wondering what the hell she's doing, but since he's also skulking around the underground for no particularly good reason, he can't exactly go call her on it. He also probably doesn’t want to admit that he has some kind of supernatural darkvision that lets him see in what, again, is an underground cavern with no light whatsoever.

 

Instead of confronting his mother, Christian gets to listen to a conversation between Erik (a mysterious man that he just has no idea about, somehow) and the daroga, who has apparently arrived to stop him from going after the desolate and extraordinarily unsafe Christine. The relationship between Erik and the daroga is decently well-drawn, even if it is touched on only briefly; the idea of the Persian as the Phantom's opposite number, providing reasonable and responsible counterarguments to Erik's impassioned demands, is nicely present. In fact, several lines, most notably ones in which Erik refers to the Persian as his conscience, are forcefully reminiscent of Susan Kay's 1990 novel, which made the Persian a significantly more central figure than he was in Leroux's book, so I’m guessing the relationship Meadows is alluding to is the one from that book.

 

Christian, despite not having any idea whatsoever about the world in which he lives, and despite being a sheltered performer from an aristocratic French family, somehow still knows how to identify the seal of the Persian national police, on the fly, in the dark. It's easier than having him talk to the man and learn who he is through character interaction, I suppose.

 

The great retcon of the end of Lloyd Webber's musical - not Leroux's novel, since that whole daroga and death and newspaper thing apparently didn't happen - is revealed here, and not for the last time, because characters are going to go on and on and on about it like you wouldn't believe. Ready?

 

At the end of the previous story, after letting Raoul go, Christine instead chose to remain with Erik because of her unbounded love for him (initially, she says this was because, a la Leroux, she had to promise to be his wife to save Raoul, but then she realized that she totally wanted to stay anyway so it's all cool). They "married", by which I mean that they declared they were married (applicable in many cultures and time periods, but not in 19th-century France when the participants are Catholic), and then for some reason Erik decided that Christine would be better off without him, so he faked his own death with the aid of a Romeo & Juliet-style drug and sent her home with Raoul, who, incidentally, he never actually let go and had been keeping locked up in a dungeon all the while. 

 

This convoluted mess is trying to have its cake and eat it, too, and of course it isn’t working. Erik may let Christine go, but not before he gets everything he wanted - validation, love, human contact - and his reasons for doing so are confusing at best. He doesn’t do it because he realizes that kidnapping and captivity are bad bad things he shouldn’t have done or because he realizes that real love can’t hurt someone this way and that he has to let her go if he loves her; he does it because... something something, mumble. He also blatantly lies to her in order to get her to stay with him, promising to let her fiance go while keeping him imprisoned without her knowledge, and when he does decide to let her go, he does it by forcing her to leave when she doesn’t want to, lying to her again (this time about his death, which is traumatizing), and then handing her off to another man rather than anything approaching letting her make her own decision.

 

In other words, it utterly fails to redeem Erik through his act of love, because he doesn’t sacrifice anything and just keeps on doing exactly the same controlling, distressing, and deceitful things to Christine he’s always done. It’s just an excuse for Meadows to say that Christine and Erik definitely had The Sex, and to de-legitimize Raoul as her love interest by making him the consolation prize instead of the chosen fiance from the original story.

 

In other words, it’s garbage, and so is Erik’s current behavior, which is a lot of wailing and rending of garments and threatening to attack the daroga if he doesn’t let him go kidnap Christine again.  You… but you… but you sent her AWAY, man, you… this is just SO MUCH NONSENSE to get the characters into the dramatic positions Meadows wants them without employing a shred of goddamn logic. Even if we had been bamboozled into thinking Erik had been redeemed by his act of nobly giving up his “wife”, apparently it didn’t take.

 

By the way, are you confused about Christian's age? So am I. I definitely wanted to give it earlier because I got the impression he was significantly older in the chapter portions of the book than the prologue, but I couldn’t. He is twelve near the beginning of the book, when he's asking about his face and beating up boys at boarding school, but then "time passes" and no clear age is set for a while. I can't find the passage that got it into my head that he was fifteen for a while, but the next time we get a solid age for him is three-quarters of the way through the book, when he's seventeen. To further complicate matters, the back cover copy claims him to be nineteen, despite no textual evidence to support this.

 

But, anyway, don't let me bore you with basic facts about the main characters. Not when there's deathless prose like page 32's "Ever since our first encounter, I had never doubted the deep, dark force that surrounded his essence" to enjoy.

 

By far my favorite part of this early-in-the-book muddle is the interlude in which Christian attempts to cross the lake to Erik's house via boat and falls victim to the siren. The description of the attack mirrors the one given by the daroga in Leroux's book, and Erik's later flippant explanation is just as ambiguous as the original's, keeping the scene mysterious. Unfortunately, the characters continue to be boneheads; it is a shining moment when, seconds from passing out from near-drowning asphyxiation, Christian reflects that he finds the presence of the attacker "strangely comforting". Yes, I'm sure his completely unknown biological connection is enough to cancel any discomfort he might be feeling from having been attacked and almost murdered by a relative pretending to be supernatural.

 

A very distressing trend begins on page 30, in which Erik apparently has a "mound of sorrow" in his soul. Throughout the book, Meadows will frequently refer to mounds of emotion, as though the characters sweep all their feelings into piles and then wallow in them like pigs. I can't even figure out the literary effect that she's trying to achieve; what IS a "mound of sorrow", and how does one arrive at the conclusion that it is the best choice when describing a character's sadness? A mound of sorrow? What? 

 

Chapter 3:

 

While not strictly mythological, the Greeks come back in for a rally later when Erik demonstrates "the speed of Achilles", referring to Zeno's famous paradox. Considering the nature of the paradox, the use is a little bit ironic, but hey, she's trying.

 

It was in this chapter that I started keeping track of the number of times specific words are used, because Meadows apparently has a very limited vocabulary of words from which to draw when describing emotions. "Agony", "ecstasy", and "sorrow", in particular, are used with such reckless abandon that they cease to have any meaning. They appear in every vaguely applicable situation at the drop of the hat, and nobody reading this book should have any difficulty imagining a scenario in which Erik's agony and sorrow over having barked his shin on the organ is soothed by the ecstasy of a bandaid.

 

Naturally, when Christian wakes up in Erik's house and the disfigured composer is playing at his organ, he determines that the thing to do is clearly to unmask him. Obviously, we're trying to draw a parallel between him and his mother, but she was an innocent young girl who wanted to see the face of her mysterious yet alluring benefactor, while he is a kid who's almost just been killed and is completely at this man's mercy. He fails to unmask the Phantom, but his attempt does enrage Erik to the point that "his golden eyes had turned scarlet", so like, I am aware that yellow eyes don't really occur in nature and that Leroux employed the device in order to cast doubt on his character's status as mortal or supernatural, but that’s still hilarious. The Erik of Meadows' novel is completely, unequivocably human and has no supernatural elements at all, and while I can tolerate his yellow eyes as a nod to the original novel and as a part of his character image, I can't get behind them randomly turning into glowing coals like the Saturday cartoon villain-of-the-week.

 

Christian goes home and has a teenage hissy fit rant at his mother, who immediately caves in and promises to tell him the whole story, despite her previous convictions that he must be protected by never knowing. It is far from the last time that she will totally fail at being a responsible mother (by her own standards). She does the exact opposite of what she says she should do for Christian’s benefit all the damn time.

 

Book 2:

 

Chapter 1:

 

The entire first half of this chapter illustrates that Christine is, apparently, one big fat failure at being Catholic. I don't demand that the characters be monks and nuns - after all, they're people, and people do things against the dictates of their religions all the time - but this is a woman devout enough to actually believe that she was being visited by an angel. Her convoluted discussion of Erik's past sins and how okay they are is vastly touchy even for non-Catholics, just on the basis of general social mores. He's murdered people, but that's okay because people are mean to him? He's going to go to Heaven despite being a murderer who gives God the middle finger whenever possible, because it wouldn't be "fair" if he had to live in darkness after death, too, since he already does in life? Lady, that is not how mortal sins work. The entire time she's reflecting on this as she believes he's dying next to her on his bed, I wanted to slap her. If she'd really loved him, she'd have gotten a goddamn priest down here some way so he could be shriven before shuffling off his mortal coil, but apparently she's hoping that the rules of her religion don't apply to him for some reason. 

 

Again, I'd really love for some version of the story to explore Christine's views on religion in-depth. Was she originally that devout, or was she just clinging to the idea of the angel out of grief over her father? If she was, how did finding out that the angel was a fraud affect her faith, and how did that in turn affect her later actions? Did she absorb any other religious ideas, especially from the Phantom, who lived in a Muslim society for a while and was angry with the very concept of God? Are ideas like “he has to go to Heaven because it wouldn’t be fair otherwise” because of some major change or shake-up in her religious views? Sadly, this book doesn't even try to pretend that it's doing that. It's just the author using Christine as a mouthpiece and thus ending up with out-of-character apologism.

 

I almost missed the extended pondering of Erik's blamelessness, because it was followed by four pages of recap from Leroux's novel. There was not nearly enough new material to make it interesting. It's a tricky thing to rewrite the ending of a piece in order to make a sequel work; there's a very fine line between not explaining enough for the reader to get it and explaining too much and boring the reader silly, and this book didn’t come down on the positive side.

 

I've complained about this before, but why do so many authors insist on Christine referring to Erik as her "angel" after the big reveal, after she knows he's a human being? That’s an incredibly important moment - he’s broken her faith and shaken her religious convictions, not to mention that Erik himself desperately wants her to know him as himself and makes it clear so there won’t be any more confusion. She never refers to him as an angel again after she learns the truth in Leroux's novel, instead calling him Erik until the end; even in Lloyd Webber's musical, she uses it only at the climax of the final piece, and it's not used in an affectionate way but rather in order to remind him of his previous kindness to her and shame him for his current violent coercion. 

 

Why use a name that would just constantly remind her of a betrayal that, in Leroux's novel at least, was devastating? Why use a name that doesn't apply to the character at all outside of that deception? It's lazy shorthand meant to help superimpose a positive image over Erik's mixed bag of sympathetic and unsympathetic behavior.

 

This version of Erik uses chloroform to drug Christine and make her more tractable, which is definitely not angelic. Oh, but he’s her true love.

 

Meadows uses a lot of turns of phrase that are at best baffling, at worst sort of counter to the effect she is intending. I understand the intent when Christine says that Erik's and her mutual love "welded our souls together", but the result is that the reader is just having visions of industrial equipment. Every hyper-dramatic sentence is more amazing than the last, such as on page 54 when Erik's "body erupted with the mound of sorrow that had collected in his soul," (mound of emotion again!), after which Christine's "heart ruptured with the force of his agony". These people are exploding.

 

Taking a leaf straight out of the 1991 Stuart novel, Erik's and Christine's souls remain "bonded" indefinitely after they declare their love for one another, which leads to a ridiculous convention wherein every time they touch one another they have some sort of empathic link that allows them to feel one anothers' emotions. This is always literally described as feeling the other person's emotions crash into them or sweep over them or otherwise wash them helplessly out to sea. The text makes it clear that the author is not considering this any form of magic or supernatural occurrence; no, they just have that much love. They are better than you.

 

Interestingly enough, Philippe is apparently alive and well, which I… guess explains how Raoul still has standing among the aristocracy, if his older brother is helping him? We can add his survival to the list of changes made to the end of Leroux's novel, and like the others it’s there because Meadows wanted to remove the Phantom murdering anyone so he wouldn’t be unsympathetic. Philippe himself barely gets more than a cameo as a passing mention in which someone notes that he "almost disowned" Raoul for marrying Christine (well, I'll be damned! Meadows did look at the social stigma! ...except not really, but at least she acknowledged its existence) but then changed his mind. Bye-bye, Philippe. Hope to see you in a later retelling.

 

This isn’t the first spin-off of the Phantom story in which Christine "marries" Erik; the end of the 1990 Kay novel was almost exactly the same as the story Christine is relating here (though that book didn't claim the relationship to be a literal marriage, just a metaphorical one), and the 2002 Pettengill book featured an actual church wedding for the two characters. This comes from the idea of Erik's "entitlement" to Christine: that is, he's suffered and deserves a happy ending because of it, regardless of what actions he might have taken, and therefore Christine gets offered up as a wife on a silver platter because she is the physical representation of the things he wants - social acceptance and personal validation. Christine becomes an object used to reward the “real” main character, and this book just has her drift sadly between Erik and Christian (or, as we should call him, Erik II) because those are the only things she’s allowed to care about. It’s disheartening.

 

Meadows does address Christine's more independent actions in Leroux's story, but she describes them from a point of view of Christine's helplessness and devotion rather than her personal strength. For example, when Christine slams her own head into the wall in an attempt to escape captivity via suicide in Leroux's novel, it was an act of surprising strength and independence as she refused to allow herself to be a passive victim of Erik's actions and demands, but Meadows describes Christine as reacting "like a trapped animal" who is too weak to face the reality of the situation and wants to kill herself to avoid having to say no to either of the men involved. It’s not an invalid interpretation, I guess, but it doesn’t go down well with all the effort being put into making Christine a trophy in her own goddamn story.

 

For those keeping score at home, Meadows is indeed attempting to set up a situation in which Raoul and Christine aren't really married because Christine was already married to Erik first. All of the characters will absolutely accept this as the truth and defend this marriage to the death later in the novel... with the exception of Raoul, who will point out that his wedding to Christine involved vows and a priest, whereas her "marriage" to Erik did not, but everyone will ignore him because he's just a big mean jerk who wants to stand in the way of true soul-welded love. Had Meadows found some way to actually make them a married couple - bring in a priest! Do the background work to make any of these characters plausibly believe in no-ceremony weddings! Hell, have us suddenly find out that the Persian is a Muslim imam! - this might have worked out, but she didn’t, so it doesn’t. Honestly, it makes sense for Erik to feel he's outside of society and for his marriage to be one that is mutually agreed on and that could have been touching, too, but the author is in such a hurry to get to the florid prose about eternal love and also getting it on that she doesn't go into that, either!

 

But, wait! All that hasn't happened yet. Rewind to Erik's and Christine's "wedding night", which actually happens some time later than the "wedding" because Erik doesn't want to freak Christine out. In Leroux's novel, Erik could be said to at least in part represent sexuality for Christine; he is the unknown, the dangerous, the compelling, all of which combine with a definite aura of genitive creativity to make him a sort of forbidden fruit for her. However, his desire for her, in return, never seemed particularly sexual to me, being more about his insecurities and his driving need to prove himself to the world, God, and his own fears by having a wife and becoming a member of society, thus forcing everyone to acknowledge that he is a man rather than a monster. Of course, the idea that Erik's love for Christine is in part motivated by his desire to prove himself to be human is not very romantic, but that's part of what makes his eventual epiphany and redemption when he finally lets her go and acts in her best interests so poignant - he has stopped acting selfishly and begun to love unselfishly. 

 

By the late 1980s, adaptations of the Phantom story have begun to skew so markedly toward the romantic interpretations of the Phantom rather than the horrific ones that it’s almost inevitable that the Phantom would get sexier (some of the horror movies before that touched on sexuality, but usually just as another threat to Christine, not an attractive quality). At this point in time, I’m dying to see a modern author tackle the story with a Phantom who is sexually representative but not actively sexual - or who is even asexual or not attracted to women (or whoever is standing in for Christine, in the case of those few adaptations where the singer is a dude). Do something new, y’all.

 

What all of this really means for Meadows' novel is that when it comes to the literal Phantom-sex, I'm always interested to see how it goes, why it happens, and what that means for the story and for the time period in which the story was written (and, hey, if it's well-written, toe-tingling sex, bonus!). Unfortunately, the sex scene is about what you would expect from the abysmally overdramatic rest of the text, being a combination of things that make no sense - your dress "seemed to melt from you", Christine? - and hilarious prose imagery such as the "fire deep in the pit of [Christine's] stomach". It is mind-blowingly bad in its simultaneous heavy utilization of cliche, confusion, and just plain poor writing. There is, naturally, an earth-shattering orgasm for virgin Christine, sleeping with her virgin husband.

 

We already knew that the Phantom's appearance is based on the Lloyd Webber musical rather than the Leroux novel, but it appears that he may have been watered down some even from that, judging from the descriptions here of his "full and pink" lips. That Lloyd Webber makeup isn't a full-body deformity, but it is also pretty famous for its grotesque lips.

 

Post-sex, Erik has a conveniently-timed crisis of conscience and decides that he can't demand that Christine stay down here with him forever after all. It would have been much nicer of him to have this epiphany before having sex with her and seriously damaging her chances of marrying anybody else (not that her chances were great in the first place, but it sure doesn't help), but you can look at the situation as a sort of extension of the kiss epiphany in the novel or at the end of the Lloyd Webber musical. Since Meadows wants this to be a much more passionate, sexual relationship between Erik and Christine, apparently this version of Erik isn't satisfied being kissed for the first time and has to get laid for the first time, at which point he experiences the same understanding that he's not being kind to Christine by keeping her hostage. 

 

Of course, there's a serious difference in that this version of Christine is mooney-eyed over Erik and doesn't want to leave... so he drugs her and sends her torpid body home with Raoul, who he's been keeping locked up in the next room for his entire honeymoon, apparently. Erik's somewhat roundabout justification is that he's giving her a choice to go experience Life Upstairs with Raoul and that she can come back if she chooses him instead, but the fact that he’s trying to frame drugging a woman so she can be kidnapped against her will instead of being an adult and telling her he’d like her to leave is not a good look. She never does come back, because Raoul is a sensible dude and wants to tell the police where the murderer lives and she has to promise never to go back there in order to stop him, and also probably because he DRUGGED HER AND KICKED HER OUT WHILE SHE WAS UNCONSCIOUS and that is a pretty obvious sign a dude does not want you around and you should not argue with it.

 

Christine's insistence that Erik is dead makes a little more sense here when she relates the story of how she went back to his house to deliver her wedding invitation (your wedding, remember? To Raoul? You do remember him?) and saw him expire of a wasting sickness, after which the daroga booted her out of the house again and sent her home. Of course, we already know from the first few chapters that this was faked, but she doesn't.

 

Christine is kind of a massive asshole to Raoul, starting now and continuing on throughout the rest of the book. From her internal musings on how her love for Erik is "infinitely more important than what I feel for Raoul" to her hysterical tantrums when he tries to do concerned things like stopping her from being recaptured by a guy who murdered people, locked him in a dungeon, and drugged her so he could have her removed, she is really, really less than admirable in her dealings with him. I want him to dump her neurotic ass and move to Jamaica with a supermodel.

​

But to be on Christine's side about something for a minute, can you imagine if you loved someone, married them and had your wedding night, and then they drugged you and when you woke up they'd handed you off to your college boyfriend like a hand-me-down sweatshirt and then you found out seventeen years later after raising their child that they'd faked their death to avoid you? How is Christine not coming for this man with a hunting rifle? Does Meadows honestly think the dude being like "oh, sorry, I just really loved you and panicked" would make it all fine so they could instantly bang again five seconds later? 

 

In case you weren’t done with this sex scene for all the reasons above, in closing I’d like to remind you that this whole part of the story is being told by Christine to Christian, so that means she’s detailing her sexcapades to her teenage son. At length.

 

Chapter 2:

 

Yes, it is apparently confirmed that she did tell Chapter One to her son. All of it. Including her earth-shattering Phantom-induced orgasm. Yeah, I know he's seventeen (I think), but that is still way way way WAY too much information for your kid, Christine, especially in the nineteenth century.

 

Christine refers obliquely in her internal monologue here to the fact that Christian is Erik's son, rather than Raoul's (this is a SHOCKING REVELATION, by the way). This will not officially be announced until another quarter of the way through the novel, at which point everyone will again act shocked and surprised.

 

The bizarre descriptions continue, from Christine's body "melting into the covers" to the "mountain of utter joy" that is now quivering in her soul at the thought of reuniting with Erik (what, mounds of emotion aren't good enough for her anymore? Now it's mountains?). Christian's eyes glow (yes, glow) when he's angry.

 

Here's a question I had for much of this book: Raoul is always away on "business". He goes here, he goes there, he goes to London for a week. But since he hasn't been removed from the de Chagny line or fortune, what, exactly, is this "business" he's always up to? I assume that if he were still in the army, some mention of that would have been made, but he ain't. I don't think that Meadows knows, either. I imagine her waving her authory hand: "Oh, you know, he's doing viscounty things. Pay attention to Erik and Christine and stop bothering me about these unimportant side characters."

 

Now that Christian has revealed to Christine that Erik is, in fact, still alive, she naturally trots right on down to the opera house to look for him, even though that's a terrible idea (and something she promised not to do). There we discover that apparently Erik doesn't physically age because he looks exactly the same after almost two decades and that both he and Christine are perpetually leaky faucets, because I don't think anyone stops crying from this point until the very end of the novel. Every action and conversation is accompanied by a rain of agonized tears, which really loses its effect when it's constantly ongoing. Unfortunately, because I know this is supposed to be a poignant scene, I couldn't care less about Christine's indignant hurt over having been tricked or Erik's agony-wracked regret at having driven her away, because I think they're both pretty much jackass characters and I don't give a damn about their reunion. 

 

Christine says that she loves Raoul "as a brother", which is a classic modern interpretation of Raoul's rule as the safe Gothic lover from Leroux's novel; while the original novel sets up the choice between two equally appealing but fundamentally different romantic ideals (Erik, the sexually-charged and mysterious, passionate affair, and Raoul, the loving, warm, undemanding suitor), many modern readers view Raoul as less of a hero because of his lack of passionate context and subsequently reinterpret his feelings (or, at least, Christine's feelings for him) as platonic love rather than romantic. It's interesting to note that while Christine is often reimagined in this way to love Raoul in a strictly platonic context, he always still loves her romantically, despite the fact that she is an equally innocent, non-sexually-connotated character. There’s probably an element of self-insert wish-fulfillment there, where readers imagining themselves in Christine’s place want the adoration of both characters. Another idea that might apply is the possibility that patriarchal culture still views innocence and sexual repression as desirable traits in a woman but not in a man, leading us to view Christine as more positive because she possesses them and Raoul as less so for the same reason.

 

Chapter 3:

 

And then, boom! Christine is banging Erik like there is no tomorrow! Like, every night! Seriously! The attempt to circumvent the issue of adultery by saying, "Oh, well, I was married to Erik first!" is still an obvious attempt by Christine (and the author) to rationalize behavior that she knows to be unethical.

 

Page 95 is like distilled literary pain. Erik has "eyes full of questions that [Christine] answered breathlessly with [her] soul". Moments later, the same eyes "became tortured pools of tears". Then his eyes are "burning questions of desire". This all happened in the same paragraph.

 

But then we got to the very bottom of the page, where Christine reflects that "It had been seventeen years, seventeen long years since I had last made love."

 

...WHAT. Are you trying to tell me that you've NEVER slept with Raoul, your HUSBAND? What the hell is going on here? What is going on here, it turns out, is that she did sleep with him a few times, but after Christian was born the doctor informed them that another childbirth might kill her, so Raoul refused to touch her after that out of concern for her safety. I know this is meant to illustrate the loneliness and passionlessness of Christine's marriage to Raoul, but what it really tells me is that he loves her too much to risk her safety just to get his rocks off, while Christine apparently doesn’t even bother to mention the danger to Erik (it's especially ironic that she's thinking about how she couldn't sleep with Raoul WHILE sleeping with Erik but no, she still doesn’t think to bring it up). No, she is achieving "release from the shackles of celibacy, release from the nagging thought that perhaps I was not as attractive as I used to be..." Yeah, good thing you have someone to cheat on your loving husband with now.

 

About a week later, Christine suddenly remembers that she could get pregnant, and "wonders how she could have forgotten it". I also wonder that, since she was thinking about it DURING SEX. There is much angst over Erik's wayward penis bullets once she tells him about this, though I find it kind of hilarious that no one has realized that there is the secondary concern of Raoul possibly suspecting something is up if the wife with whom he does not have sex suddenly turns up pregnant. Luckily, Erik is apparently able to whip up a Plan B elixir in the bathroom, so any possible Phantom Baby Part II action is averted for now. Later, in order that the mad bangerating not be interrupted, he shows her "a device used by people to prevent pregnancy", so now we can all have fun trying to guess what kind of “device” it is. It’s probably just a condom, which was present in the nineteenth century, though unpopular, only sort of effective, and usually made of animal intestine. But can one call an animal-intestine condom a "device"? Why does this sound like Meadows had to throw in something to allow the shagging to continue, but didn't feel like doing any research into icky things like nineteenth-century birth control because it might involve details that would ruin the warm glow of the characters' mounds of happiness?

 

The following line, "Raoul had never offered a solution to our intimacy dilemma," does not engender the intended feelings of preference for Erik that it's supposed to. It just makes me annoyed by the heavy-handed attempt to convince the reader that it's okay for Christine to cheat on Raoul because he's not trying to use contraception (incidentally, not okay in the Church as well, which, as revealed by some of his later dialogue, Raoul also belongs to) and thus doesn't really want/love/deserve her as much.

 

Back at the Chateau de Chagny, Christian's eyes have apparently become gold with brown flecks in them, rather than the other way around. This makes no sense, but is at least less ridiculous-sounding than the glitter-eyes were.

 

Unexpectedly, the person I like most here is Christian. Christine's rhapsodic internal monologues about how much she loves Erik and how much the sex makes her soul sing are interrupted by her son pointing out that she is treating his father badly and flouting her marriage vows. He even hopes that Raoul kills Erik at some point, which I can only agree with because it would speed up the conclusion of this book. In fact, anybody, please kill somebody else important. I have other things to do and this book is not making reading it quickly an easy task.

 

Erik is now SHOCKED to discover that the kid who looks and acts exactly like him in every way except for the facial deformity is, in fact, his son. Why Erik, supposedly a genius, could not figure this out when he even knows the timeline matches up, and why he would be stalking the kid if he didn't know it, I couldn’t tell you.

 

Now, there has been a lot of evidence for Meadows borrowing heavily from Kay's novel already, what with her characterization of Erik's and the daroga's relationship, her description of the events at the end of the novel, and the idea of the Phantom's son being raised as Raoul's, but it all becomes official here. Erik actually refers to the daroga by name and that name is Nadir, which is of course the name assigned to Leroux's nameless Persian by Kay in her own book. While Kay's novel was out of print at the time that Meadows' book was released, it had not fallen into the public domain, which makes the use of its characters and plotlines probably not a great idea.

 

Book 3: Erik

 

Chapter 1: 

 

One really has to admire Christian's chutzpah in trying to shoot Erik in order to avenge his father’s honor and save his mother's virtue. I cannot, however, admire the fact that he wants to "reek" revenge instead of wreaking it, since that implies he has on some kind of Eau de Retribution. Even less admirable is the fact that Erik plans to murder him in order to hurt Raoul and only stops when Christine starts screaming that the kid is his son rather than Raoul's. Christine is remarkably okay with carrying her half-strangled unconscious son back to Erik's house to recover, but then again, Christine is remarkably okay with pretty much everything Erik does, no matter how reprehensible.

 

There is much sorrow over the horrible fact that, had Christine ever told Raoul that the child wasn't his, she would have been kicked out of his house for unfaithfulness! She would have been alone in the cruel, cruel world! There would have been poverty and people looking down their noses at her! Honestly, if Raoul has remained faithfully married to Christine for seventeen years and loves her so much he goes to great lengths to safeguard her health, I don’t know where she gets the assumption that he’d throw her out to die in the gutter from. It’s just something the author informs us of and assumes we’ll agree with. Erik is able to conveniently feel all of this just by touching Christine, when the torment of her wealth of sadness rushes over him like a tidal wave or something, and he mourns how she had to shoulder the secret of the boy's heritage all alone. It's all very dramatic.

 

In case we needed any more confirmation that this Nadir is in fact the same one from Kay's novel, his wife's death, a large part of his backstory, is mentioned in conversation. Oddly enough, Meadows uses the name Nadir very infrequently, probably fewer than ten times throughout the novel, and usually refers to him as either the daroga or the Persian. I have to wonder why she bothered to borrow the name at all, since it seems like it's either accidental writing that she didn't check for consistency or an attempt to ride on the coattails of Kay's success in the Phantom community.

 

We indulge in a short flashback, in which Erik discovers Christine's pregnancy seventeen years ago when he hears Raoul chastise Christine for riding in the middle of the night in her condition (what is she doing riding a horse in the dead of night? Nobody knows). Christine insists to Raoul that she isn’t sure if she’s pregnant yet by giving him way too much detail about her periods for a nineteenth-century lady, which begs the question of why she said anything to him in the first place. Does Raoul have her cycle on a calendar somewhere or something?

 

Apparently, Erik saw childbirth "several times" in Persia. I am pretty sure that, seeing as how he is male, he would not be allowed at births, especially in Muslim Persia, but nobody cares what I think. Luckily, he has a magical drug that makes the baby pop right out and completely eases her pain like SuperMorphine. Is there no aspect of physical health that Erik can't whip up a potion for? Fuck being the Phantom, he should go into alchemy and the apothecary business. Or become the world's creepiest midwife (imagine seeing THAT dude when you look down between the stirrups). Somehow, he knows vast volumes about childbirth, but doesn't know that babies are often born with blue eyes and fair hair that may darken to other colors later, so he is convinced that the kid is Raoul's and goes off to mope somewhere.

 

Chapter 2:

 

Christian continues to be the only person willing to call Christine on her bullshit. From his cutting response when Christine accuses him of showing her disrespect ("Disrespect, Mother? You have an affair... How much respect are you showing for Father?") to his enraged response to her attempts to defend said affair, he’s having none of her insistence about soul-welding. Christine resolves the situation by slapping her son and then going off to have more sex with Erik, because why just be irresponsible when she can also be abusive? 

 

Oddly enough, while it seems like Erik's mask is full-face as in Leroux's novel, it is consistently described as white, which links it directly to Lloyd Webber's musical. It seems likely that Meadows is mixing the two versions there, and indeed she does so when it comes to the disfigurement itself as well; she never tells us what it looks like, stating only that it covers his face and doesn't extend to the rest of his body.

 

I'm curious about why Erik still refers to Raoul as "the boy", considering that said vicomte is probably nearing 40 by now. It's easy to forget that Erik is meant to be much older, what with the mysterious lack of physical aging he's got going on, but it seems plausible that Erik still thinks of him as a boy; after all, he hasn't had a lot of direct contact with him since the events of Leroux's novel. On the other hand, he's been stalking Christine at her house for the last seventeen years and has probably seen him grow up just as much as anybody else, so it's open to interpretation, and besides, it’s confusing. Christian is here being an actual boy, which makes me have to sort out who he’s even talking about every time he does that.

 

Speaking of Raoul, Erik goes into a rage when he learns that Christine's husband once had her locked in a room with doctors for several nights because she was ranting and raving about coming back to Erik's lair. Christian owns all the adults again when he points out that not only was Raoul doing so out of genuine concern for her safety, but hello, hypocrisy much, Erik? (And no, we never get to hear about any of that, what it was like for Christine, what it meant for her and Raoul, how she recovered, what they all thought. Because it isn't important and it's just here to make sure you know Raoul is Bad. No one cares about Christine, just about the feelings of the men who want her.)

 

Chapter 3:

 

I have to say, by this point, that I want to know what happens. These characters are just such a huge clusterfuck that I have to see how Meadows is going to try to resolve this vast snarl of a situation that she's created, and I can still see the kernel of an interesting plot premise under there. I want to see how the story turns out, even though I want to strangle all the characters and I can't stand the quality of the writing. If only Christine would stop making out with Erik in front of her horrified kid...

 

When Christian accuses Christine of betraying Raoul by having an affair with Erik, she pulls out the "married first" card, as I knew she would, and claims that she was betraying Erik all the years she was married to Raoul. Christian, who is smarter than his mother would like, points out that since there was no priest and the vows were never recorded, she never actually married Erik. Christine retorts that "it's all the same, isn't it?" and insists that God heard the vows, which is a very nice idea that completely rationalizes her ability to have her cake and eat it, too. Christian's incredulous pointing out of the fact that that would mean that her vows to Raoul didn't mean anything and she’s been lying her ass off for years is met with mumbling, waffling, and indecisiveness, because Christine is incapable of even deciding which marriage is valid, much less choosing one of the men. 

 

It would be nice if I could view this as a natural outgrowth of her character in the original novel, in which she was torn between the two as she tried to figure out what she wanted, but this Christine is not doing that. This Christine chose both and is playing a game of diminishing returns trying to have both while she knows that this isn't possible, and, not incidentally, doing pretty irreparable emotional damage to a lot of people while she does so, including her son. As a reader struggling to like or identify with her as a major protagonist, I am deeply frustrated by her inability to make a mature decision here, and am not impressed by her choice to behave in a reactionary way as her emotions dictate instead of taking some responsibility for her life, her choices, and the welfare of her child. Christian eventually gives up on getting any sense out of her and departs, saying, "God will repay you for this treachery, Mother," and, damn, I really hope so.

 

Also, Christine actually says, verbatim, the following immortal line when Christian points out what a dangerous disaster Erik is: "Yes, I have no doubt he's murdered. But I can see beyond that, Christian." I don't blame Christian; I would have given up at this point, too. He's more tolerant than I am, in fact, because I would have told Christine where to stick it when she instructed him to lie to Raoul for her about her whereabouts.

 

There is more extremely obvious borrowing from Kay's novel here, including Erik's time as an exhibit in the carnival sideshow, the earlier scene from his mother's house in which he sees his face for the first time in a mirror and attacks the apparition in a panic, and his mother's furious reaction when he asks her for a kiss and she rebuffs him. These scenes are partially rewritten, since they are being told from Erik's point of view rather than from his mother's, but very little has been changed. A further element of Kay's novel is present here when Erik begins having heart episodes, which will increase in frequency over the course of the book; this device was also used in Pettengill's 2002 novel, though it's likely that she also borrowed the idea from Kay's work.

 

Erik is by this point tired of sharing Christine's time with Raoul and suggests that he use the same drug on her that he used to simulate his own death, which would then allow her to be free to live with him while the upper world thought she was dead. In her first responsible move of the novel, Christine refuses because of the grief it would cause her son to think she was dead, though frankly I kind of wanted her to do it, then tell her son she was alive and just let everyone else think she was dead. Go have your underground love nest, let Raoul remarry someone who actually loves him, and let me go read something that doesn't make me want to stab all the characters.

​

A way better strategy would be for Christine to just leave Raoul for Erik. Why isn't she doing that? She will literally NEVER EXPLAIN why she doesn't just do that. The author seems to think this is a love triangle where Christine is torn between her feelings for the two of them, but she consistently works to make sure we know that Christine has no romantic feelings for Raoul and her marriage to him doesn't even count, so... why is she still there? It's not for Christian, who knows what's happening, hates it, and is an adult anyway. JUST LEAVE HIM AND GO DO WHAT YOU WANT TO INSTEAD OF BEING AN ASSHOLE, CHRISTINE.

 

Had she stopped with it being hard on Christian, I would have liked her for the decision, but on page 169, she adds, "But what about God, Erik? Isn't it cheating God, in a way, to pretend to die? Aren't such decisions His?" Oh, NOW you care about God? You're okay with bigamy, adultery, blasphemy, and murder, but FAKING YOUR DEATH IS WHERE YOU DRAW THE LINE.

 

Meadows starts getting concerned that there hasn’t been enough action in a while, so Erik kills a mugger on the shores of the lake. What the hell is a mugger doing in the sub-sub-sub-basement of the Paris Opera House? No one cares because the important thing here is that this additional murder is not Erik’s fault because he did it to save Christian so there can't be any aspersions cast on his role as the hero. I didn't pay much attention, partly because the interlude is mostly pointless (it serves only for Christian to get to actually see Erik kill someone in person rather than just suspecting it) and partly because I was too distracted trying to figure out how anyone could have written the phrase "It seemed as if he had inherited many of my sixth senses" with a straight face.