The new managers of the Paris Opera inherit a standing instruction they take for a joke. Box Five stays empty for the Opera ghost, and the ghost is paid twenty thousand francs a month. They laugh, sit in the box themselves, and the chandelier comes down on a full house.
Christine Daae hears a voice through the wall of her dressing room and believes it is the Angel of Music her dying father promised to send. The voice teaches her until Paris rises for a singer nobody had noticed, and then it asks her to come down. Below the stage, past the cellars the scene shifters will not cross, over a black lake, to the house of a man whose face is the reason for the mask.
Leroux swears in his prologue that every word of it is true. He wrote the book as reporting, out of the managers' memoirs and a magistrate's file, with dates and depositions and the names of witnesses. That dry, sworn surface is exactly what lets the horror underneath it breathe. The stage version most people know is a love story. This is the book it came from, and the book is closer to a murder file.
What it is finally about is a man who was never once looked at without fear, and what a lifetime of that does to him. He is not a monster who wants a woman. He is a man who wants one hour of being treated like anyone else, and has learned that the only way to get it is to make people afraid.
This is the Civil Savage Society edition of Alexander Teixeira de Mattos's 1911 translation, the first English Phantom and still the one quoted, newly typeset in a 6 by 9 inch US Trade format, 250 pages. Leroux's prologue, all twenty six chapters under their roman numerals, and his epilogue, with the author's own footnotes on the page carrying their marker. Dropped: the public domain apparatus and the American publisher's magazine appendix about the Opera House, which is an article about the scene of the work rather than the work.
Paperback: perfect bound on cream stock. A workhorse copy, meant to be carried, dog-eared, and marked up.
Hardcover: casewrap edition built for the shelf and the long haul.
E-Book: instant download, delivered to your email at purchase.
Print editions are produced on demand. Nothing warehoused, never out of print.
