When I think of Gason Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera all I hear is this song. NSFW y’all.

I grew up surrounded by a certain type of 1980s girly girls. Not the ones who dressed like Madonna, the ones with prairie dresses and fluffy perms. Sheltered girls who loved Jesus and wanted to keep house for a strong but tender man. I was supposed to turn out like that but I watched too many scary movies and Satan ate my soul and replaced it with brimstone. It happens sometimes.

Every one of these girly girls seemed to love Jane Austen, Titanic, and the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Weber. All of these things are apparently romantic as hell and girls I grew up with would get together specifically to watch Pride and Prejudice or listen to The Phantom of the Opera together. I was told “oh my gosh, you have to watch this!” so many times that it made me stubborn and even now I have never watched Titanic, never read Pride and Prejudice, and never listened to an Andrew Lloyd Weber song all the way through. So I wasn’t looking forward to this book. I put it off on purpose.

This might sound strange from a devotee of gothic novels, but epic romance usually leaves me cold. It’s not that I’m a cynic. I’m a believer in true love and unbreakable bonds, I love a good adventure and I’m not bothered by impossible coincidences and ridiculous plot devices. It’s more that I’m very thinky and geeky and postpunk, and the characters portrayed in these epic romances are usually very hotblooded gender stereotypes that I just can’t relate to so I don’t care deeply about whether they end up together or not. It’s boring to me in the same way celebrity news is boring to me–I just don’t care what pretty, conventional people do with their lives.

Put those same bland characters in danger, though, make them crawl through dark tunnels or lock them in dungeons, and I’ll gladly read about them. I don’t care who the bland heroine marries, but I care deeply whether she makes it out of the dungeon alive.

Phantom of the Opera definitely has epic romance to spare. Will the poor and beautiful Christine run away with the handsome and temperamental Raoul, or will she be doomed to die with the evil but tragic Phantom Erik? I get the impression that the musical focuses on this “love triangle.” In the book, Erik is about 10% tragic and 90% evil stalker/kidnapper so it’s less a love triangle and more of a rescue mission on Raoul’s part. The story is presented as being pieced together after the events are finished, from eyewitness accounts and clues the narrator has pieced together. The internet says Leroux is France’s answer to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and while this novel has no star detective it does have that mystery novel feel. It’s quite exciting as Erik’s clever tricks and traps are explained and Christine and Raoul face ever greater danger. The Paris Opera House proves to be as grand and mysterious as any gothic castle, full of trap doors and secret passages. There was enough adventure here that I found myself rooting for Christine and Raoul even though they were barely fleshed out as characters, and there were a number of fun and intriguing minor characters I enjoyed as well. Some of them provided good comic relief between more dramatic scenes.

Overall I enjoyed this novel. It was a unique twist on the gothic theme, especially in its sympathy for the villain Erik. The novel presents him as definitely the villain, but it also heavily implies that because he has never been loved by anyone, he has no real grasp on how human feelings work. He’s a psychopath, but he’s also desperate and lonely and can’t really tell right from wrong. This novel was written around 1909, and the ideas of psychology had been seeping into literature for quite a while by that time, so Leroux gives more thought to the villain’s backstory and mental state than earlier gothic novelists did. I love a good, complex villain so it was nice to read this early attempt at creating one.

I still have no plans to listen to the musical, but I might take a chance on one of the older, more horror-focused movies based on the Phantom. If you are a fan of the musical and also enjoy a bit of gothic horror, you might enjoy the book, especially if you go in expecting it to be very different from the show. I give it two haunted stars.

And with that, my official gothic reading list is done. I’m still going to read the three extra I added myself, and then my project will be done. As I’ve read through this list, it’s spawned another even longer list of gothic novels I want to read, so I may be starting another reading project as soon as this one’s done. I’m having a lot of fun reading these old stories so I hope you’re not all bored to tears by them. Oh well, what else would you expect from a Ravenclaw?