Hey, did you know that Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera novel is available free on Wikisource or Project Gutenberg?
Did you also know that it is completely gloriously bugfuck bonkers?
- When the ballerinas are talking they hear a noise outside, and the head ballerina goes to check it out with the knife she always has, straight up ready to stab a ghost
- The phantom shows up at the dinner party between the new and old managers and nobody says anything because they all think he's with the other guys
- He doesn't have any dramatic entry to the masquerade ball - he's just wandering around in a cape with DON'T TOUCH THIS GUY embroidered on it in gold, and when somebody does he grabs them and glares at them, because come on, man, my cape asked you to do one thing
- The phantom’s name is Erik. We know this because my dude is constantly talking about himself in the third person like an anime imouto
- Ever wonder why there's suddenly a horse in the musical? Turns out it's because he just fuckin' steals one. Dude gets himself a basement horse.
- His lair is a house on an underground lake with specifically surreal "middle-class" decorations. Dude has, like, cabinets from Pottery Barn
- Except for his own room, which is all in black, and where this goth motherfucker sleeps in a literal coffin because "One has to get used to everything in life, even to eternity"
- Dude goes out shopping and makes lunch. Christine specifically talks about eating some shrimp and a chicken wing that he'd set out like fuckin' Pagan Min
- Christine has way more spine and agency than in the musical. Erik doesn't just randomly decide to bring her back from the first abduction; she deliberately butters him up over two weeks to convince him she'll come back if he lets her go
- Then when Raoul demands to know where she's been she's like buddy I was at the corner of Nunya and Business
- It's also her own idea to stay so Erik can see her sing on stage one more time
- Erik's eyes specifically glow in the dark. This is relevant because one night Raoul thinks he sees glowing eyes out on the balcony. He tries turning the light on and off a couple times, and they're still there, and not answering when he calls out. So he is sure it's the Phantom and shoots him with a gun. There's some blood and Raoul's brother is like dude you shot a cat, and it's never mentioned again, so I guess there really is a cat out there with a scar and a very weird story
- The phantom claims that the chandelier just did that
And that's before it gets really insane.
.Then in the second half of the book,
- This is the part where we learn the methods by which the phantom kills people, and every single one is fucking amazing
- Even just the good old basic lasso has a bonkers backstory where he worked for a sultana murdering convicts for her amusement, and "the little sultana herself learned to wield the Punjab lasso and killed several of her women and even of the friends who visited her," which seems like it would cut down a lot on visits
- He actually has an extensive employment history, including being a contractor working on the opera house, so I guess all the other construction workers were just like, "Yep, that's ol' skullface mixing the cement"
- One deathtrap is called the Siren. This is where he has an alarm set up that tells him when somebody is approaching the lake, so he can go swim into it and then near the surface to breathe and sing through a reed until the intruder, drawn by the music, comes close enough that he can jump up and drown them. Which is just so many steps
- The managers try to catch the phantom picking up his salary (he has a salary he is very insistent about), but when they look in the envelope he's replaced it with the old-timey France version of Monopoly money. There's a whole sequence about them trying to evade getting their money taken. It is seriously like 2 chapters.
- Have I mentioned that Raoul cries a bunch? Because he does
- Enter the Persian, who is (along with Christine) the real hero of the whole thing, and whose job it is to get this twink through the plot alive
- Erik calls the Persian "you great booby" at least 4 times
- So you know how before I said that Erik goes out shopping? Did you wonder how he does that? The Persian tells you. "When he went out in the streets or ventured to show himself in public, he wore a pasteboard nose, with a mustache attached to it, instead of his own horrible hole of a nose. This did not quite take away his corpse-like air, but it made him almost, I say almost, endurable to look at."
- Bitch puts on a Groucho nose and mustache to go buy shrimp
- One of the spooky things attributed to the Opera Ghost is a "floating head of fire" in the basement, which turns out to just be the ratcatcher guy walking around with a red lantern and a shitton of rats
- Raoul and the Persian get into Erik's lair through what they keep calling "the Communists' road"
- As somebody mentioned before, Erik's whole plan is to marry Christine and have a nice regular house with no pit traps because "now I want to live like everybody else. I want to have a wife like everybody else and to take her out on Sundays." Dude just wants a place in the suburbs
- And then slide directly into getting trapped his Room What Is For Killin' People and accomplish absolutely nothing
- The Killin' People room is a bunch of mirrored walls with an iron tree so that it looks like you're trapped in an infinite forest - specifically "an African forest!" because there are also heating elements so you get super hot and thirsty and delirious and eventually hang yourself. This takes a while, so Erik hangs around behind the scenes freaking them out more by using instruments to make lion noises. I have to love any murder method that requires foley work
- The phantom is apparently nicknamed "the trap-door lover"
- While they're trapped in murder room, the Persian does all the useful work of searching the walls for the escape switch, while Raoul just runs around flipping out. Seriously the most useful thing he does is flop down on the ground for a while because then the Persian is like, good, he's out of the way and not bonking into the mirrors like a Pomeranian
- Eventually they find the switch escape into a basement full of gunpowder
- This chapter is called "Barrels! Barrels!"
- Because, see, Erik's plan is - stick with me here. There are a little scorpion and a little grasshopper on the mantel, and if Christine says "yes" to marrying him, she's supposed to turn the scorpion around, and if she says "no," she's supposed to turn the grasshopper around. Because the grasshopper lights a thing that will make the barrels explode and blow up the Opera House. Erik emphases this threat by constantly saying that the grasshopper "hops jolly high!"
- When Christine eventually does agree in order to keep her friends from being very complicatedly murdered, she is like, "Hey, wait a minute, you're sure the scorpion is the one that DOESN'T explode everything, right?" and the phantom's like "Yes, it is definitely probably not not not the exploding one"
- Except what the scorpion does is flood the basement/murder room, so the dudes almost drown instead, until Christine is like OKAY OKAY I WILL MARRY YOU AND I WILL THROW IN A BONUS OF NOT KILLING MYSELF, which she earlier tried to do by bashing her head against the wall, holy shit
- So then the dudes are okay and kicked out. And we learn about Christine showing compassion and then being let go from Erik, who goes and talks to the Persian about it
- Look, say what you will about Andrew Lloyd Webber, simplifying this part was...it was a good decision
- And then. Once the phantom has come and told the whole rest of the story to the Persian, our last glimpse of him is as he gets into a cab
- Motherfucker takes an Uber home and is never seen again
