The Phantom Library

This book is a masterpiece among disasters.

I only just graded this as an F, and already I regret how little it manages to convey the depths of my combined horror and morbid entertainment in regards to this book. This book is such a fucking wreck that I seriously can't communicate my feelings in a single letter. I need words. Lots of words. And since de Mendes also needed lots of words (almost 500 pages of them, holy shit), this is a long ride, my friends. Bring snacks.

This book is huge, to begin with. It is 497 pages long from start to finish, with a quick-and-dirty estimate by me of about 190-200,000 words. That's the kind of volume that makes people hesitant to attempt even famously excellent pieces of literature... and baby, this is not one of those.

I entered this book in a fairly light-hearted fashion, to be honest, because while the back cover copy suggested to me that it wasn't going to be high literature, it also made it look like it was going to be more hilarious than awful. Here's what the author has to tell those of us who are considering whether or not to pick this book up and take it home with us:

"The tale of the Phantom of the Opera did not end in the labyrinth beneath a Paris theater. In your hands you hold a story of love and madness, of triumph over the damage of ridicule and cursed rejection. A determined soul, one capable of enduring a dark and unholy journey, managed to find its way back into the arms of the mate Destiny had ordained for it.

Imagine the woman discovering, almost too late, the identity of her true love, a man she'd let slip through her fingers. Would she not ignore pride and search out a way to get him back? Yes! Christine Daae clawed a path to Erik, and he in turn mastered a demented part of himself in order to affect a degree of sanity and possess her. But were these two sets of glorious arms enough to hold a love spawned in hellish mystery?

Let us see, brave soul, let us see."

So, you know, we don't really even have to open this one to identify some of the perennially popular greatest hits of self-published Phantom fiction: ridiculously over-dramatic prose, uncomfortable power dynamics of possession and ownership equaling romance, and the deep and important way that if you're not physically crying over Erik's hard life at this exact moment you are pond scum. But we've been told that we're brave to attempt this book, and now that I've read through it, I agree. It takes courage to dare this book. This book has probably killed less hardy people.

Prologue:

One of the things we can just start out being mad about out of the gate is the technical inconsistency of the writing. While sentence structure and flow aren't terrible here and have a serviceable ability to demonstrate logical continuity and paint reasonably vivid pictures of the action, the lack of copyediting is apparent. We’ve got abundant punctuation and formatting errors, homophone mismatches, and an annoying habit of swapping perspective between characters at inopportune moments.

The very first paragraph of the book drops three very necessary hyphens from words that need them, leaving us looking at something that is "gold painted", learning about the "post Napoleon" era, which sounds like a command to send the venerable former Emperor something in the mail, and hearing about a "three story" building. Word choice is also a fairly common problem - many sentences are in the right general neighborhood of what they're trying to say but fail to quite reach the word they're looking for, such as when on that same first page "a strong clan of dark-skinned g*psies touting brilliant scarves about their heads" are apparently telling everyone how great their headwear is for no reason (and, as is unfortunately usual in Phantom literature, throwing around an ethnic slur with no apparent knowledge that it's incredibly offensive).

This is a lot of focus on technical stuff, but please remember with me that there are almost five HUNDRED pages of this, and it wears on you after a while.

The story opens in the year 1873, which obviously sets the events of Leroux's novel about a decade earlier than generally suggested, most likely because of the same timeline being used in the 2004 Schumacher/Butler film based on Lloyd Webber's musical. This book likes to pretend it's very cosmopolitan and based on a whole bunch of different versions of the Phantom story, but usually it's just painting a detail here or there over an otherwise clearly rendered continuation of Butler's growly-voiced, constantly-bewildered Phantom. And speaking of, only the "upper right quadrant" of the Phantom's face is masked, so you know that in spite of how much everyone is inclined to cry about Erik's accursed ugliness, he's not exactly rocking a full-bodied disfigurement of Leroux-like proportions. As usual, I wonder about the thought process behind looking at a character who's supposed to be visually terrifying, and not only saying, "My novel doesn't have the constraints of a stage musical but I'm going to continue using a half-mask instead of a full one anyway," but also adding on, "HALF A MASK IS TOO MUCH! PEOPLE WILL THINK HE LOOKS TOO GROSS!"

Meg has been married at this point, post-Leroux's-story, to a gentleman named Jean, who we will later see confirmed to be the Baron Castelot de Barbezac, who of course Leroux mentioned in his own prologue. Yay for continuity, and for Meg getting some awesomeness!

Apparently, Madame Giry, the Phantom, and someone you'll never guess (hint: it's the daroga, who else would it be?) left a burnt corpse in the cellar of the opera house to be found by the authorities, so everyone besides the three of them officially believes Erik to be dead and the story can begin from there.

Chapter 1: Herald Back the Dead

Hoo boy. Welcome to page 3, y’all:

"Hearts take warning here. Let this tale of woe and triumphs unfold to those whose allegiance to the myth enshrouding the truth proves them loyal. And know this brave soul, the Phantom's voice calls thee 'friend'."

Hey, we're brave again! (Well, if there were a comma in the right place, we would be.) This is clearly intended to be somewhat in the style of Leroux's no-this-is-real-honest reporting, but it's not exactly working, unfortunately.

Here, confusingly, we hear that Christine and Raoul were married in the year 1871... so wait, then this is set even earlier than the 2004 film? Like... good god, people. Had the Prussians even left yet? Romance in the time of the Commune? Does anyone actually know what was going on in Paris at this time? Is there a hole in the space-time continuum that robs authors of all knowledge of Parisian history in regards to this story so that they literally can't help themselves?

So, here we will have set up, in a few introductory paragraphs, this book's most important and constantly repeated mantra: Christine is an evil monster for leaving the Phantom and marrying Raoul, and she deserves to be soundly and constantly punished for abdicating her responsibility to make him happy. Before the page ends, we learn that even though it's been two years, she regularly "tears her clothes and pulls her hair" in despair over her own actions, frequently begs God to forgive her for "throwing away the Angel of Music so callously", and is generally anguished and wants to die.

I just... so many books do this, and it just makes me so sad. Authors so frequently excoriate Christine for not wanting to stay with the Phantom, ignoring the fact that he lied to her for her entire life, stalked her, kidnapped her, abused her, terrified her, murdered people, sabotaged her workplace and the source of her livelihood, and threatened everyone she loved in pursuit of his own goals. Yet somehow, the idea that he did all those things FOR LOVE motivates many writers to forgive them and to correspondingly blame poor Christine for not responding with love herself, as if somehow the fact that he loved her meant that he was allowed to do anything he wanted to her and excused every terrible sin and act of terror he committed. It feeds into a very awful cultural idea that men who go out on a limb FOR LOVE should be rewarded by the affection of the woman they want regardless of who she is, what she wants or whether she has any interest in him, because she's merely a reward for his devotion rather than a person who gets to make decisions herself; and therefore Christine is derided - constantly and without mercy, in this book - as a horrible selfish person who has committed the ultimate in sins by refusing to do what this guy wanted her to do just because he wanted it.

There’s a glimmer of an idea that could have worked here. Christine obviously went through a great deal of trauma during the events of the previous story, and even though she was very seriously mistreated by the Phantom, she also had a strong emotional attachment to him and was conflicted about what to do. It’s not at all outside the realm of possibility for her to have traumatic lingering issues, a mental illness, or mixed feelings - in fact, it would be more strange if she didn’t! But that, unfortunately, does not seem to be what’s happening here. Christine just hates herself for leaving the Phantom, who deserved her and who she “threw away” by not wanting to be terrified and maybe murdered by, and the narrative agrees. This is not a sympathetic portrait of a Christine who is haunted by the complicated and frightening things that happened to her; it’s a portrait of a woman who did wrong and deserves to suffer for it.

These poor Christines. I just want to go find all of them and invite them to go be in a club with me where we hit entitled dudes who don't understand that murdering the competition is never the way to a woman's heart in the face with tennis rackets. Also, maybe the authors who do this.

But, at any rate, Christine is miserable because she refused Erik's true and undying and excessively abusive form of love, and that's going to be going on in a dizzying seesaw of approval/demonization for this entire book. When she's nice to Erik and doing what she's "supposed to" - i.e., loving him and doing what he wants - she's the best lady ever to exist. When she's not doing any of that (or anyone happens to remember that she used to not do that because god forbid we ever forget), she's a dirty slimebag.

de Mendes does not spend a lot of time in this novel bothering with things like "setup" or "plausibility" or "any reason any of this is happening", so by page 5 Erik has reappeared after being gone and presumed dead for the past two years, allowed Christine to see him stalking her in the marketplace again like some kind of bad straight-to-video sequel of their previous relationship, and she is "elated" and wants to "bolt from this store into [his] arms." Why on earth she ever left the Phantom to marry Raoul in the first place if she was this torn up over not being with Erik is not addressed, nor is there any hint of either surprise (as in holy shit isn't that guy dead is someone fucking with me) or fear (as in holy shit that guy is a murderer who used to stalk me). Nah. It's cool.

Raoul is the Count de Chagny now, by the way, and Christine his Countess. Not only does this book include and refer to the death of his older brother Philippe in Leroux's novel, but it actually becomes a fairly major motivator for Raoul's character, which is one of the few things I really enjoyed. Philippe's death continues to affect events in this book at various points in time, which is a poignant choice and one not often employed by writers that primarily base their work on later versions of the story.

Christine (whose eyes "glassed over in tears" on page 6, which sounds unfortunate for her health) is very take-charge in this scene, not only confronting Erik but also setting up a meeting with him at her father's tomb, mostly on her own initiative. I am often torn about this book's Christine - on the one hand, she's very forthright, knows what she wants, and takes action to get it, all things I can applaud in a heroine, especially one so often demoted to the status of the hero's prize. On the other hand, see the aforementioned need to constantly punish her at every turn for daring to make those decisions - de Mendes allows Christine to choose her own path, but her decision-making is only important and/or acceptable if it aligns with Erik's wants, and if she chooses something he doesn't like she ends up run through the wringer while the author metaphorically shakes an admonishing finger at her.

I've been referring to the Phantom as Erik already in this review because after five hundred pages in the wilderness I can barely remember the opening chapters, but there's some mention here of the fact that Christine does not in fact know his name until he tells it to her here, which definitely points to more influence from the Lloyd Webber musical and subsequent 2004 film in which he was nameless.

And now, by page 8, Christine and Erik are banging inside her father's tomb, with no explanation of what the hell is going on, how they are interacting after years apart and the trauma of their last time together, or any kind of anything that would help this make sense except for a dramatic speech from Christine about how she needs Erik and will die without Erik and is "his for the taking".

I have many questions (oh, so many questions, throughout this entire mess, but let's start here):

1) What's the psychological analysis here? Christine is a character who originally thought that this guy wasn't even human, then learned that he was under traumatic circumstances, then escaped and married someone else and has presumed him dead for years, but her first thought is to jump straight to sexual relations. Couldn't we have spent some time exploring that? No?

2) If Christine hates being married to Raoul so much (and she does, she tells us unrelentingly), why does she choose to set up regular booty calls (IN HER FATHER'S TOMB) with Erik here instead of running away with him? This makes sense out of Christines with genuinely torn feelings between the two men, but de Mendes wants us to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this Christine hates spending time with, having sex with, and committing her life to Raoul, so what exactly is her motivation to not just leave, especially now that she has re-found the stalker who is apparently her soulmate? Could we at least talk about possible economic motivators, such as Christine being financially dependent on Raoul, if you want to make this work? No?

3) If they've already found one another, consummated their love and passionately declared that they want to be with only one another forever and no one can stop them, what is even in the rest of this book? We have 489 pages still to go!

Erik's physical appearance isn't truly described for a while, but mention is made here of his "imperfect lips", which is clearly a callback to the famous stage makeup for the Phantom in the 1986 Lloyd Webber show, and his eyes are described as "golden", which hearkens further back to Leroux's spectral antagonist.

Oh, man. Check out page 9:

"This time their lips found each other in intoxication, and something wonderful happened, something that rarely occurs among men and women. A transfiguring event so momentous, that its incidence upon the earth causes angels to stop and stand in silent admiration. Erik and Christine's souls fused. They were simply one person, one entity. The rift of self-awareness dissolved away by the magic of sheer ecstasy."

It's been a little while since we read a novel that went in for the idea that Erik's and Christine's souls are beautifully but tragically welded together by some sort of spiritual blowtorch. It's of course one of the favored devices in the Meadows novels of the early 2000s, and crops up now and then in various romantic versions of the story (often involving vampires), usually with similarly hilarious results. I'm also a fan of the clumsy writing in there that makes it seem like this is only rare between men and women; sure, de Mendes was probably just being a little unintentionally homophobic by forgetting or ignoring that people who are not men and women fall in love sometimes, but I’d prefer to pretend that this means that couples with other gender configurations are just running around fusing like they escaped from Steven Universe.

They are LITERALLY having sex again ON TOP OF HER FATHER'S SARCOPHAGUS. There is the CORPSE OF A LOVED ONE TWO FEET BELOW THEM. I don't think this is what Daddy Daaé had in mind when he said he would watch over you from beyond the grave, Christine.

After this first assignation and the creation of a sexytimes schedule to ensure that there's more graveyard bangerating in their future, Christine goes home, locks herself in her room, and refuses to bathe for several days running lest she remove any "traces of him". Eww. Honey.

Meanwhile, back in the Daaé tomb where he apparently just hangs out in his free time, Erik sits around being confused about Christine's surprising out-of-left-field declarations of love, which I feel him on. The back cover of this book says that she discovered he was her true love - but how? When? What changed her mind about him, or herself, or Raoul, or all three? This freaking mess doesn't even acknowledge her previous thoughts, actions or feelings, not even so much as to give a vague explanation of why they no longer apply - she loves him, she's always loved him, boom, done. She's basically a completely new character with functional amnesia of the previous novel's events, except for the memory that she was A Bad Bad Person, Shame On Her.

Erik does talk to himself in the third person some here, though, which is classic Phantom behavior. He won't do it very often in the book, but then again, neither did Leroux's Erik do it all the time.

He also spends some time fantasizing about "healing her by giving her children," which is a train wreck all on its own. Leaving aside the very important question of whether or not she even wants to have children (or wants to have them now, or wants to have them with him specifically), which he has definitely not asked her or in any way opened a conversation about... hasn't she been married to Raoul for the past two years? How has she not had children with him yet, considering that that would be a pretty normal expectation in this time period and situation?

Since we have absolutely no insight whatsoever into Christine's relationship with Raoul other than her telling us offhandedly that she doesn't like being with him, we can't even guess which weird reason might be behind this. Are we suggesting that he's impotent as in the Forsyth novel, or that she's barren? Do they just not have sex, as in the first Meadows novel, and if so, why not? Does she throw things at him whenever he comes near her or something? Has this ever been an issue before, or is this just one of the many many MANY times that authors refuse to let Christine and Raoul have children because doing so would in some symbolic way be "legitimizing" their relationship?

Also, not only does Erik not know if Christine wants children to begin with, but assuming that knocking a woman up constitutes "healing her" of psychological distress is one of the ickiest things a Phantom has said in a book ever, and my friends, I have read a LOT of ickiness. All women do not want children, and a woman getting pregnant certainly does not necessarily “heal” her of whatever problems she has, and I am horrified to even be explaining any of this.

A caretaker at the graveyard catches a glimpse of Erik here and says he has "a face like a skeleton", which is confusing in light of the teensy quarter-mask he keeps wearing. However, please note that Erik gains a German Shepherd as a pet here, because it is scientific fact that no one an animal loves can ever be a bad dude and all animals automatically love the Phantom. He's a good guy. Write it down.

Chapter 2: Avow the Unspeakable

Alas, we knew it was coming, but confirmation appears here that Philippe de Chagny is in fact dead and was found drowned on the shore of the underground lake just as he was in Leroux's book. What does not follow the path of Leroux's book is that the police decide that Raoul and Philippe must have been quarreling over Christine's affections in order to explain it, which begs the twin questions of how that makes any sense whatsoever (poor Sorelli does not get any say in this book, but I imagine she would have some choice words) and why Raoul has not been prosecuted for murder in that case. As should not surprise any of you who have ever read or seen film versions of Phantom sequels, however, the police force of Paris is entirely staffed by clowns, so no further thought is applied to the situation.

de Mendes takes one of the more common approaches that authors who don't like Raoul and want him to no longer be considered a good romantic option for Christine often do, and devotes some time to making sure that we know how much his life, environment, belongings and general existence are too overblown/exaggerated/gaudy and everyone should be embarrassed about his crassness. The narration literally says the line "money can't buy happiness" during its quest to inform us that Christine could never be happy here among all this disgusting richness. As usual, while of course being rich aristocracy is not the only way to be happy in the universe and there are plenty of sad aristocrats throughout history, I am baffled by the consistent authorial insistence in these books that being rich is automatically always worse than being poor. Rich people can be genuinely in love, too, you know. (Also, the original Raoul gave up his riches in order to disappear with Christine at the end of Leroux's book, but somehow authors always seem to force him to be rich in their sequels and then yell at him about it like it's his fault.)

There's also a less-than-subtle suggestion that Christine only showed up for the money anyway, which of course totally ignores everything about her relationship with Raoul in Leroux's book. In fact, Christine spends three straight pages complaining to herself about how much she doesn't like her life here and emphasizing that therefore it's totally morally okay to cheat on her spouse - and this entire journey goes without a single moment of Raoul's presence or even one line about her feelings for him. Seriously, you could be forgiven for thinking that she married the house itself, and there was never another human being involved at all.

Speaking of architecture and poor decisions in relationships, Erik decides that, rather than finding a far less creepy and inappropriate meeting place for their trysts, he'll just go ahead and start tunneling and modding Christine's father's tomb to add a love nest for them in the walls. Well, you can't say the man isn't consistent in his creepery.

Erik is described on page 19 as having "thick raven's black hair", which is hilarious both because it implies that the hair actually belongs to some now-denuded raven that he apparently took it from and because Erik is not exactly renowned for having fabulous locks. Oh, Butler, whenever I turn a corner, there you are. Another nod to Leroux's deformity appears here with the mention of a "half-nose", but that isn't commented on further, and in the same breath de Mendes reconfirms the deformity's confinement to only a quarter of Erik's face.

But then a minute later they're talking about him as a "walking skeleton" again. This book is giving me a headache. I don't think even de Mendes knows what's going on with this character.

By the way, this novel is often billed as an erotic and sexy romance-filled steam-fest, which... I mean, I guess it is trying to do that. Erik and Christine have a whole lot of sex (also occasionally Christine and Raoul), and de Mendes is clearly trying to make it titillating and fun, but not only is there nothing particularly hot or inventive to jump out at us, but the frequency of the sex scenes and their habit of taking up zillions of words' worth of pagespace that could have been better spent not reading this book makes them all run together after a while. Sadly, I didn't experience even an iota of ticklishness reading this, and believe me, that would have made it go faster.

Like, see when the phrase "the aching of her crotch was intensifying" is used. That's not making me think about sexy things. That's making me think of diseases, or that possibly Erik kicked Christine in the vulva really hard when I wasn't looking. Also, "crotch" is never the right choice. Never.

de Mendes also wants us to know that, scandalously, Christine isn't wearing any underwear! I was not scandalized, but I was amused, because the very idea betrays a massive lack of knowledge when it comes to womens' clothing in the nineteenth century. Most women were wearing more underwear than we wear clothes nowadays as a matter of course - are you trying to tell me that Christine left the house without corset OR chemise OR drawers OR petticoats OR corset cover OR crinoline OR bustle, and no one noticed? My friend, underwear in the 1870s was structurally required just to make the normal clothes look right.

Erik is lovingly described here as the most incredibly gifted lover ever to put tongue to relevant parts of someone's anatomy. As usual, that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever because we're supposed to understand that everyone hates him and no woman will willingly have sex with him except for Christine, but shut up, he's just naturally gifted. Always. In every goddamned sequel or rewrite ever.

I do, however, like him being described as "the embodiment of a portamento" on page 21, connecting him with the music that is so important to his character while giving us an impression of smooth sexiness. I do not as much enjoy the fact that Christine is "in the throws" of a climax later on the same page, though. It makes me think he's hurling her around inside the mausoleum or something. And while I was enjoying the music metaphors when they started, by the time Christine is describing her FOURTH orgasm (all from penile penetration only because CLEARLY Erik has a magic penis and doesn't need to do anything other than pop it in and rev it up) as a "Da Capo al fine", it's become too ridiculous and I'm just waiting for them to hurry up and finish already. "You could have had me if you'd stopped that before it became terrible" is a recurring theme in my relationship with this book, sadly.

The first interesting thing to happen in this book is that it's actually Erik who tells Christine she should stay with Raoul rather than running off with him; not because he did so, because it's clearly a contrived plot device to try to manufacture romantic conflict and drag this awful story out as long as humanly possible, but because of his reasons. Aside from the possibility that he could be caught and tried for his crimes if anyone figures out that he isn't dead, he acknowledges his own mental instability and his fear that it might affect her and resurface regardless of his attempts to be a supportive partner for her.

That’s neat, and I would really have loved it if the book had done a good job of exploring the struggles of a person with a mental illness trying to manage its challenges while maintaining a positive and supportive romantic relationship. I can see where de Mendes tried to do that, but ultimately the novel only trots out Erik's psychological issues when it needs some convenient drama or has run out of ideas about what to do, and we never gets deeply into what he's doing to try to handle them or how they affect his life outside of his own brief bouts of navel-gazing about them.

Oh, by the way, all emphasis in this book is for some reason done via bold lettering, rather than the conventional italics used by professional publishers. Just in case you forgot you were reading a self-pub.

Erik has by this point installed an elevator in the Daaé tomb, necessary of course to reach the love nest which is apparently also partly in the ceiling. An elevator. In her father's tomb. Even more hilarious than that is the fact that when he unveils the elevator and informs Christine that he added a room with a proper bed for them to enjoy, she instead basically says, "Whatever, just bang me on the floor of the tomb down here, you stud." Which he then does.

(Hey, Christine having a death fetish could be a neat thing to explore. In some other book, that actually knows what the hell it's doing.)

We now discover that Erik lives in Madame Giry's house, because it's another unwritten commandment of derivative Phantom-based literature that the Girys must always be involved in the Phantom's life until the end of time, regardless of whether or not that makes any sense. I can't figure out if Erik actually works or just squats in Madame Giry's attic, and she spends the entire novel being a basically faceless yes-woman whose job is to support his covert relationship with Christine and totally back him up no matter what morally questionable or obviously reprehensible things he does.

This sort of behavior would make a little more sense out of Leroux's Giry, who thought the Phantom was going to ensure her daughter's future if she obeyed him, but de Mendes makes it extremely obvious that we're looking at Miranda Richardson as Madame Giry from the 2004 film, and considering that she eventually said "This guy is a murdering maniac, I'm going to out him before he kills or kidnaps again" at the end of that movie, I'm not sure what the logic is here in re-defaulting her to accomplice again.

And speaking of people who are here to be yes-men and for no other reason whatsoever, the Persian's on the scene! He has a new original name, Khalil Salim (literally "safe friend" in Arabic - I see you trying to be subtle over there, de Mendes), and just as Giry has bewilderingly forgotten all about realizing that Erik was a dangerous murderer and menace to society, so he has totally forgotten about all that tracking and arresting and attempting to stop Erik's reign of terror that he was doing when we last saw him in Leroux's novel. Instead, he is and always has been Erik's bestie (possibly there is some influence from Kay's 1990 novel here, which was the first to really hit the idea of the Persian-as-Erik's-sidekick), and they are happy and at ease, grin frequently when hanging out together, and are both totes cool with using one anothers' secret passages. They call each other "brother". Literally no one remembers any murders ever taking place. We are in the Twilight Zone.

As is common in books that seek to make Erik the hero and therefore want to minimize his previous villainous actions, de Mendes tweaks the events of Leroux's novel and claims that Philippe's death was an accident, rather than the implication in the original novel that Erik (or his mysterious siren, if that happens to be someone else) drowned him. I was actually kind of excited to see this device used on someone other than the unfortunate Buquet, which tells you how many times I have seen people try to pretend Erik never killed Buquet. Jumping Jehoshaphat, it is so many times.

As you can probably tell, none of the secondary characters in this book - including the not-yet-introduced but later important Meg and her husband - make any sense when compared with their previous incarnations in either Leroux's book or any version of Lloyd Webber's show. They would actually have worked better if they had been re-imagined as a sort of morally suspect League of Extraordinary Gentlemen instead of trying to use existing characters that don't fit into all these wrongly-shaped holes, but that would have required, you know, creativity.

We have now FINALLY seen Raoul, for the first time in the entire book. Don't get excited, though. It's only so he can be mentioned in a line wherein he leaves home with no comment or any kind of description of him or his actions. For a while I wondered if Raoul was actually going to be a sort of ghost presence in this book, mentioned but never appearing in the flesh. Now that I've read the rest of it, I so so so so so greatly wish that had been true.

Oh, goodie. It has been a little while since we heard the "I had sex with Erik first when I was a captive by the lake, therefore I'm really married to him even though I am so totally not" defense for cheating on Raoul, hasn't it? I'm definitely detecting more than a hint of Meadows' influence in this book now. This is one of my most hated devices in Phantom lit. No, you asshat, the fact that your kidnapper said you had to marry him or he would kill everyone and you agreed because you wanted people to live does not mean that you were then instantly wedded. You didn’t really consent and there was no actual wedding. If you're going to run out on Raoul, own up and do it, and stop pretending that your marriage to him isn't “really legitimate” to justify your affair instead of actually just taking action. I promise, everyone in this book would have been SO much happier.

She also says that Erik "tricked her" into leaving with Raoul. Clearly, de Mendes is privy to a totally different final lair scene than the one I've read and seen. We can only hope it will be shared later.

Everyone spends a lot of time here talking in dire tones about the terrible consequences should Raoul ever find out about Christine sleeping with Erik. This is funny, because he still hasn't actually had any lines or appeared in any scene in this book in any meaningful way. It is especially funny when Khalil refers to him as "royalty", which de Mendes will continue substituting for "nobility" throughout the book, thus affording me the constant amusement of wondering how Raoul got to be the king of France without anyone noticing.

Chapter 3: Nasty Rub

Don't ask me about these chapter titles. Some make sense, but then some are "Nasty Rub".

Apparently Raoul is now a merchant boat-builder who makes his money selling vessels to various military and private organizations. I assume this is de Mendes' attempt to handle Leroux's backstory of the man as a naval soldier in the French military, but I am bewildered about why he would want to leave the military to go build ships instead, not to mention what happened that made him a businessman. Interestingly, a lot of later versions of the Phantom story convert Raoul into a rich businessman who is constantly "away on business"; I'm sure part of that is just to have a convenient excuse for him to be out of play a lot to make way for Erik and Christine to have illicit sexytimes, but I think a lot of it also has to do with much later, most often American authors just not having a very good grasp of what being landed nobility actually means in this time period. In the modern day, we equate being rich with having a high-powered job, because Capitalism; but kinda the whole point of aristocracy is that they don't have to do Capitalism because they have inherited wealth and privileges. This is what the people keep having all those angry revolutions about, y'all. Raoul certainly could have a non-military job, or at least business interests, in the time period, but it would be pretty weird of him to actually be simultaneously nobility and merchant-class.

Poor Raoul, predictably, has no idea whatsoever that Christine isn't happy about being married to him now that he has arrived in the book, and she never mentions it to him. It’s very, very hard to give Christine any credit for being a strong heroine when she never even expresses what she wants or likes, let alone tries to actually get it.

The presence of the word "hollered" in the narration several times is giving me endless giggle fits.

We meet Raoul's secretary LaPointe here, who is introduced while telling Raoul that he suspects Christine might have an extramarital lover based on the fact that she goes to the cemetery alone an awful fucking lot for hours at a time. It is clear that we are not supposed to like LaPointe because of his attempt to stand in the way of true love, but at this point he hasn't done anything but be observant (get better at stealth, you noobs). Raoul, however, is having none of these suspicions; in fact, his exact words are "Christine is a respectful and loyal wife," and he's kind of peeved with LaPointe for trying to harsh on his wife's recent good mood.

So far, you might think that Raoul is just a kind of innocently unfortunate dude who we have no reason to dislike, based on the fact that he is basically behaving like a decent human being who has no idea what's going on. de Mendes would like to prevent you from liking him, however, and to that end the narration often uses adverbs to describe the way Raoul talks in an unflattering manner, the most popular being that everything he says is spoken "arrogantly". Unfortunately, Raoul's actual dialogue throughout this portion doesn't sound arrogant at all - he's polite, makes good points, defends his wife, and generally sounds like a reasonable dude, giving me a hefty case of dissociative confusion between what Raoul is actually doing and what the narration says he is doing. I can only assume that the author is not a fan of the master/servant dynamic between Raoul and LaPointe and is trying to point out that it's bad of Raoul to exercise that power over another person... but I only assume that because otherwise I have no idea what's trying to happen here.

Seriously, the characters all seem to have absolutely no connection between what they do and say and how they react to it. Literally, Raoul says, "I think Christine feeling good is awesome, so don't go invading her privacy," and LaPointe's response is to think "god he's a horrible bastard I wish I could hit him." These people all have completely randomly-firing emotions.

And... now it's time for the book to begin its spiralling, hellish descent into the bowels of There's No Saving This One. In this scene, Raoul wants to have sex with Christine; she doesn't want to have sex with him at all, but she doesn't tell him that, so sex continues while we are left cringing at all the gory details while trapped in Christine's point of view. She hates him touching her, feels humiliated, abused, and miserable, and he has no freaking clue any of this is happening, so we're left reading a scene of frankly horrifying marital rape in which the rapist actually doesn't know his attentions are unwelcome and the victim spends the entire time telling us in vast detail everything he's doing and how miserable it makes her. I don't even know if we can call it marital rape; Raoul should certainly be checking in with Christine to make sure she's having a good time, but she literally just lies to him, yet feels she has to do this because <reason not found>.

There's no context in their relationship for coercion or a pattern of Christine being forced to submit to Raoul - as far as we know (and as far as de Mendes will tell us), there's just such a stupendous lack of communication here that neither party has any insight whatsoever into the other. And yeah, sure, it's pretty much in keeping with the time period for a wife to say, "Well, the husband wants his husbandly rights, I guess I'll just lie back and think of France," but that doesn't prevent it from being utterly miserable. Worse, the level of detail and style of description of their sex acts is almost identical to the happy and consensual sex scenes with Erik, leaving me distressed and confused about whether the author is trying to titillate the audience in this scene, and if not why it's so very similar to the ones that are.

So, yeah, that's terrible, and it's just the beginning of the terrible things that will be occurring in de Mendes' simultaneous quest to demonize Raoul in every possible manner and punish Christine for her inexcusable decision to not put Erik's desires before her own feelings. Get yourselves a stiff drink before we carry on.

I will say that, despite how horrible as everything surrounding it is, the line on page 39 when Christine says "She felt as if she were being devoured by Satan's penis," is tragic comedy gold. DEVOURED. By a PENIS.

Raoul, who is clueless and just happy that his wife seems so much more vibrant recently, decides to buy her a harpsichord as a gift and pay for her to have lessons. I'm sure we can see where that's probably going, but it is interesting to see a Raoul who is supporting his wife's musical interests. With the exception of the versions of Raoul (almost all film ones) who are musicians themselves, most later sequel-Raouls are usually painted as music-haters in order to draw an unappealing comparison with Erik.  It's nice to see that trope averted here.

Christine's solo adventures are not the stuff of gripping storytelling. In fact, they read like a college student trying to learn Hemingway style for an assignment - Christine did action. She saw thing. She went place. She felt emotion.

In case you were worried that the whole soul-connection thing might fall by the wayside, don't be - a few pages later, Erik "calls" Christine from Raoul's mansion with his mind. I almost miss the vampire Phantoms. At least their weird mental powers had some vague folkloric justification and rules about how they worked.

Erik, of course, rides a powerful black stallion, as is written in the law.

Most of the interesting parts of this book have to do with Philippe, and they include this scene, wherein Erik sits beside Philippe's grave and talks to the dead man. He demonstrates surprising respect and empathy, and one of his lines - "It seems, Philippe, that when we murder we change events forever," - is almost self-aware. (Although also pretty obnoxious. No shit, killing people has consequences?) Of course, soon thereafter the conversation turns into a justification party for Erik to disavow any wrongdoing on his part, but at least it started out nice.

On page 48, another example of this weird behavior/narrator disconnect:

"Christine was already at the horse corals, talking to the head stableman about learning to ride, and a spineless Victor LaPointe stood at the office window spying on her from the edge of the draperies."

Do you see what I mean? The narrator is telling us that LaPointe is "spineless", but why? What is he doing that suggests an inability to stand up for himself or make decisions? Is de Mendes trying to aim for calling him a coward for spying on his mistress, and just missing spectacularly? Is he actually sans-spine, and some kind of jelly person?

Also, I know de Mendes means "corrals", but I regret my lack of art skills that prevent me from illustrating a flowering coral reef full of tiny equines.

Chapter 4: Tormenting Revelation

Ewww. Christine writes Erik a letter and it is formatted entirely in the Lucida Handwriting font. I'm not against font differentiation inside books, actually, but I am against fonts that look like the generic program font used for every high school graduation in the 1990s.

The characters here reaffirm that Christine is absolved of the moral problems of philandering because, while she would leave Raoul to live honestly with Erik, Erik refuses to "take her from" her current happy home. There are myriad problems with this, starting with the fact that it doesn't actually absolve anyone of anything; Erik doesn't dictate Christine's actions, and she has full control of her own decisions at this point. She doesn't have to cheat on Raoul, and if she doesn't want to be with him she also doesn't have to stay in his house, and Erik saying, "No, I won't take you from there," is an author smokescreen to remove the blame from the main characters and drag out the plot as a love triangle for most of the book for no good reason. It's not their fault, they just have no choice! Except they all do, and just saying it over and over doesn't actually make it so. (Bonus: fuck you, Erik. Christine is a person telling you she wants to be with you, not a belonging of Raoul's that it would be morally wrong to "take".)

Oh, ha ha, me of the past, you sunshine-and-bunnies naive woman. My notes here are about the fact that Christine here decides she wants to go to a hypnotist; I wrote something about how it would be interesting if this had to do with Erik's once-common device of hypnotizing her and whether or not it's something she now wants or craves, and wondered in the margin whether it had anything to do with the 1944 Waggner/Karloff film's heavy hypnotism theme. Please ignore all of that. The actual reason for her visits is way more hilarious when revealed later.

Erik apparently supports himself by publishing music under the name "E. D'Angelus." Such fucking subtlety.

Ahahahaha, oh my GOD. The porcelain doll copy of Christine that Erik used to keep in his home in the Lloyd Webber musical and 2004 movie - do you remember that horribly creepy-ass thing? It's HERE. He is STILL LIVING WITH IT, now in MADAME GIRY'S ATTIC. Oh my GOD he cannot let a single iota of his creepiness go, can he?

Add another new name to the Giry files! In this book, her first name is Louisa, which is slightly confusing because it's not the French form of the name, which would be Louise, but at least it isn't something wacky. To follow it up, he also informs Christine that he's been working at her house, disguised as a mentally disabled groundskeeper, and she just didn't know about the fact that he was lurking just out of sight while she's been going about her normal life. Isn't he cute?

All right, boys, girls, and folks of other genders! As we all knew it would, the moment has arrived when Christine turns up pregnant, and naturally everyone is immediately and irrevocably sure that the spawn must be Erik's, not Raoul's. Look, they're just sure, okay? They just know. Christine again wants to leave Raoul and be with Erik now that they're going to have a child to raise, but Erik again puts her off, this time saying that he's afraid the child will be frightened by his deformity and that it'll be better for the kid to grow up as aristocracy (that second one, at least, is probably true as far as security and comfort go, anyway).

Christine, when you tell Erik that he has true beauty and then think of him privately in your internal monologue as a "gargoyle" in the same paragraph, I have difficulty taking you seriously. I'm not surprised you're not having much luck convincing him.

Chapter 5: Omens

Christine is hella weird in this book, you guys, and she has only just begun her trek to weirdness. Among other things, she uses her stairs as a mnemonic device to recall various scenes from her memories, meaning that it takes her literally hours to get up them because she stops and stands, unmoving or speaking, on each step for several minutes before moving on. She also has a collection of tiny skulls that she has named after all the dead members of the de Chagny line that went before Raoul, which she lines up obsessively in her room while reciting their dates of death and how they died.

Raoul's staff, who probably don't have the economic luxury of being like, "Well, the lady of the house is clearly completely bonkers, I'm quitting," invent quaint nicknames for these behaviors such as "the Time of Pearls" or "the Time of Skulls". I'm actually not sure what de Mendes' intent is here, but I don't dislike this device much, to be honest - it gives Christine a bit of an inwardly-focused, childlike imaginationscape that others don't understand, and is reminiscent of her characterization as a child who loved fairytales and make-believe in Leroux's book. It's also very reminiscent of Victorian-era ghost stories and mental health thrillers, which is a nice oeuvre to tap into here.

Speaking of children, Erik is seen by one here, an eight-year-old ballet student of Madame Giry's named Kate who catches a glimpse of him on the landing going up to his shut-in rooms. Erik decides to be the worst kind of creeper by asking first thing upon being told this whether the child was pretty. A big round of applause to Madame Giry, who informs him that Kate's prettiness is irrelevant, although sadly not with an accompanying slap and invitation to think about his life choices.

Meg's husband, the Baron Jean Castelot-Barbezac, is introduced for long enough for de Mendes to repeatedly establish how "unpretentious" he is, because of course only noblemen who oppose Erik are evil, not all of them. Like a lot of other later authors, this one uses the fact that Raoul is an aristocrat as a black mark against him and attempts to point to it as shorthand proof that he's morally bankrupt, but doesn't actually want to make all aristocrats evil because then there would be no opportunity for convenient money and political connections for the characters. The result, as usual, isn't very coherent.

And speaking of evil aristocrats, Raoul decides to become one out of left field. He and Christine previously had a spat over Christine's bed - it belonged to Raoul's mother and she died in it in childbirth, so Christine wanted it replaced because it creeped her out, but he resisted on the grounds that it was an important family heirloom and generations of his family had been born in it. Christine ends up giving birth to her son while visiting with Meg and Jean while Raoul's away on business (there's that convenient away on business thing!), and Raoul's response upon returning home and hearing that she's still over there recuperating is to become "savage" and start ominously sending servants to retrieve her because "Christine has forgotten where she belongs." Don't waste time trying to figure out his motivations, because none of them make sense - is he pissed she didn't give birth in the bed? Suddenly regressing to a past life as a feudal warlord? Concerned that she's going to run away with the Baron? No one knows.

Chapter 6: Married and Festering

The baby is named Michael after the Christian archangel, which is a classic name used for various incarnations of the Phantom (probably specifically because it's an angel's name, actually).

Christine and Erik need to get together and talk about their new baby and their relationship, mostly so they can continue deciding to be sad and not actually change anything they're doing, but their conversation is a trainwreck. Christine answers him in "a demure, monotone voice," which we're supposed to find romantic. She promises to never voluntarily leave Paris because he has a minor meltdown about her "leaving him", which tells me that she does not have a realistic idea of what things she might have to do in the future irrespective of his unreasonable demands. Erik accuses her of "[sacrificing] him... to the dark goddess Nyx," which is just confusing and nonsensical, and Christine promises Erik that he's not "a madman riling in a corner," because she doesn't understand how to words. Oh, and she confirms that because he has "purpose and intent" to everything he does, he can't possibly be mentally unstable, because clearly no mentally ill person anywhere has ever had any kind of purpose or intent to the things they do.

ALSO, he is gripping and hurting her arm for the entire conversation, which we just get to sort of uncomfortably endure until he realizes that he's hurting her, and when he does, he lets go but also REFUSES TO APOLOGIZE because, quote, she "wanted a man, not [the] dog who used to drool after her footsteps." UGH. YES. ONLY DOGS APOLOGIZE FOR CAUSING THE PEOPLE THEY LOVE PAIN. ERIK IS A MAN AND MEN ARE GENETICALLY ENGINEERED TO BE EVIL BAGS OF SHIT SO THEY DON'T HAVE TO APOLOGIZE WHEN THEY DO BAD THINGS, BECAUSE THAT'S JUST HOW THEY ARE.

I want to go try to analyze the Nyx thing because you all know I have a thing for Greek mythology in Phantom stories, but seriously, it doesn't have any particular bearing on the story. Nyx is one of the Protogenoi, the primordial original creator gods of Greek myth who were seldom formally worshiped even in their heyday, and she has no corresponding mythology that makes sense to apply to these two jerks.

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Chapter 7: Summon a Goblin

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Man, if they were going to actually summon a goblin, I'd be back on board. I assume it’s just a weird callback to the line in “Angel of Music” in the Lloyd Webber musical, though.

 

At this point, my notes have begun to tend toward despair. There are 400 more pages of this, and I have no earthly idea what these characters could possibly be doing for all that time. I've only spent a fifth of this book dealing with their weird bullshit, and I don't know if I can handle a continuation of the total dearth of interesting plot.

 

Oh, my god, it says here that Erik is writing "skits" and I almost swallowed my tongue laughing. And then he's "staring himself in a play." Well, if Erik did write plays for himself, they probably would involve a lot of staring at his reflection and shouting god why across the stage. This is a man primed perfectly to write terrible one-acts.

 

The narrative also clearly does not know what else these jackasses could be doing for the rest of this book, and therefore invents some unnecessary bullshit - in this case, Erik going to a bar and intentionally picking a fight with several people, because... I don't actually know, apparently angst or something. The scene is a hilarious mess, from Erik causing a brawl as easily as you might see Bugs Bunny do so in a Wild West cartoon, then him beckoning to the attackers to "bring it on" because this narration apparently needed some modernization, and then avoiding a shower of urine from an upstairs chamberpot because his "olfactory glands" were "on high alert", despite the fact that olfactory glands don't have anything to do with sense of smell and are just in charge of producing nasal mucus.

 

If you were wondering about the morality of Erik going out and intentionally getting a bunch of people injured as well as beating some up himself, wonder not: he is a giant dick. He tries to sell the reader some horseshit about how it's okay because drunks are "numb" from drinking so it's totally fine to physically assault them for basically no reason, which is both untrue and obviously not a good excuse for anything at all, and generally makes it clear that he views people at bars - which he classifies as "drunks" across the board in spite of having no idea who they all are or what their individual motives for being here might be - as subhuman and inconsequential, and therefore doesn't care about their potential suffering. I'm not sorry when his jerk ass gets knocked out later in the fight, although I was disappointed that somehow no police happened to find him.

 

Hilariously, only the gross half of Erik's face is swollen, de Mendes would like us to know. The pretty half is merely bruised. We wouldn't want to make Erik ugly or anything.

 

Christine gets in on the grossness by judging Erik for what she describes as his "waddle through the mire of the lower classes." Dude, glass houses, Christine - not only are you one of the "lower classes" yourself who only got where you are by marrying an aristocrat, but you spent most of your life in the opera house, which is the definition of lower class, and your father was a Scandinavian peasant. Also, don't you spend all your time hatin' on the aristocracy? Is there anybody your classist ass does like? (Poors just aren't sexy, that's the problem here. Leroux would weep into the wine I always envision him drinking to cope with these things people write in his name.)

 

Erik and Christine have the fight over how she wants to leave Raoul but he won't let her AGAIN here, and I am so freaking tired of it. Christine, for fuck's sake, tell the whiny ass that he doesn't get to decide for you! What's he going to do if you leave Raoul in spite of his opposition - NOT let you come have sex with him all the time and be his wife as he's spent his entire life dreaming of? There's even a perfectly good reason to say that Christine should perhaps remain with Raoul in Michael, the baby, but they don't even try. It's more important for Erik to be a manipulative cock who won't respect Christine's wishes, and who needs to spend all his time crying about how he wants nothing more than to be with her but then telling her she can't be with him and she has to go home to enjoy some more squirm-inducing unwelcome sex with her husband.

 

Erik is apparently the son of a "master mason" from Rouen - is that Kay's influence I spy?

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Chapter 8: Vassals for Scheherazade

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Remember Kate, the pretty eight-year-old? Her father is Detective Edwards, a British policeman on loan from Scotland Yard who she manages to badger into going to see Madame Giry to set up a meeting for her to see the mysterious man she saw on the stairs. He decides the best way to do this is... to break into the house while everyone's out? Does "police" mean something different in Britain? Erik, who is hiding from him, reacts by planning and readying several ways to kill him, because why not make murder the first resort?

 

After Edwards leaves, he goes and talks to fellow French law enforcement officers, who know that Madame Giry used to work at the opera house but have never heard that she has a mysterious brother. I don't know why they would know that, but like I said, this is not a police force to envy. 

 

The guy then immediately launches into telling Edwards the story of the Opera Ghost, apparently without prompting or any possible way it has anything to do with anything, because Plot! The ensuing recap of the old investigation is even worse than the hints from earlier in the book - not only are they still sure that Raoul and Philippe were lying about the Opera Ghost and just fighting over Christine, they also say that Raoul was never considered a suspect but give no reason whatsoever why that would be, and admit that they thought some of the strangulations might have been suicides but probably not all of them, but they didn't bother to investigate that part. No wonder the gendarmerie has to borrow extra law enforcement from Britain. These guys probably don't know how to put on their own pants, let alone solve crimes.

 

Oh, but better reopen that case now, though - that woman has a brother! Cue the shocked electric organ music!

 

Edwards does manage to go talk to Madame Giry in person later, in a scene whose major purpose is to establish that Giry is hot and Edwards is totally into her. She turns him down, everyone is very polite, and then we get another of those weird thoughts-don't-match-actions moments on page 115 when Giry launches into a rant about Edwards in which she angrily says that his gall "frosts my cake!" I can't tell if she also thinks he's hot and this is some sexy code, or if de Mendes really thought "it frosts my cake" was a good phrase to communicate anger here.

 

And now, some exceptionally boring and unnecessary remodeling of Giry's house in order to add more hidden passages and junk. It doesn't even begin to approach the fun of those things in Leroux's novel; where that book got much of its joy in the surprise and mystery of where the hidden contraptions and doors were and how they were discovered and their secrets learned, this one is just giving us a laundry list of materials and writing up blueprints, totally killing any fun to be had from it dead. The changes are all also out of necessity (at least according to these three clowns), so you don't even have the fun of Erik demonstrating genius because of being a genius.

 

Oh, stop participating in all this, daroga. You're only here because of Kay and we all know it.