The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux

Trying to scramble through the remains of my reading challenges, I needed a horror romance, and thought the classic The Phantom of the Opera would suit it perfectly.  It's not gory horror; instead, it's very Gothic in feel, with an unseen menace lurking in the shadows and a twisted love propelling a plot that keeps apart two more suitable protagonists.

Written as a relating of the tale behind "true" events (and apparently inspired by some actual true events, though I couldn't find to what degree) the story follows several people in a Paris opera house haunted by a "ghost."  Two new managers have recently taken over the opera and think they're being pranked by their predecessors, while overlooked singer Christine sees the ghost as the Angel of Music who brings her talent to new heights, and the young viscount Raoul views the ghost as a sort of demon leeching away Christine's life and keeping she and Raoul apart.  There are really two love stories here: the one between Raoul and Christine, which started when they were children and is now foundering in the face of the ghost's obsession with Christine; and that between Christine and the ghost, aka Eric, which is sort of love and sort of obsession and sort of sick fascination, all rolled into one.

The writing here is definitely in a "classic" style, which means that it can seem a bit distant and clinical at first, but it gets very engaging as you get used to the style and become immersed in the world of the opera.  And the opera itself is almost a character in and of herself; the opera house is huge, fantastical in ways that I doubt a real opera house could be.  With a lake built under it, floors beyond imagining, and a cast of minor characters that seem as much a part of the building as a limb does part of a body.  Even Eric and the Persian seem like their true purposes are more to be entities of the opera house than to be their own people--their backgrounds never being as fully or satisfactorily explained as Raoul or Christine's own backstories.  It's a very atmospheric feel, with almost the entirety of the story taking place in the opera house and the characters as extensions of it.

One thing to note is that I feel like Leroux read Dracula and was really pulling in inspiration from it at parts--like, you know, Eric sleeping in a coffin, or not being able to go into daylight (except he can???) and so on.  A lot of it had a very vampire-like feel to it, though I never got the sense that Eric was actually supposed to be a vampire.  Just a crazy guy who stalked a woman to the point of no return.  Cool.  Remind me why people root for Christine to end up with this psychopath, by the way?  He's a genius in his own way, to be sure...but you know, a murderer, torturer, and all around madman.  So, not exactly prime romantic material.

Anyway, this was a suitably creepy read to be going through around Halloween, and a good choice for my horror romance category.  I enjoyed it even though some parts weren't as thought-out or fleshed-out as they probably could have been.

4 stars out of 5.