Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.

I tried very hard to get through this book and was very relieved to get to the last page. I didn't enjoy this at all and thought the melodramatic "Phantom" was awful and the love triangle between him, his love Christine and Christine's love Raoul was a bit much for me. I have to say the main reason why I gave this 2 stars was that Leroux definitely captures the best parts of the Gothic genre. We have a dark and haunted opera house and within it hidden catacombs. We have a dark mysterious stranger. We have the heroine who is in fear for her life. Other than that though I found myself bored while reading. I now know why I always was hesitant to go and see this musical with friends. 

"The Phantom of the Opera" has Leroux writing this book as if this was a real story. From there we have the first tales of something sinister watching the young women who are performing at the opera house. A man is found hung and the opera ghost (as he is known) is blamed. And while this is going on the story also focused on (in the same paragraphs) that a relatively unknown singer Christine, has suddenly shown that she is a formidable singer and everyone is wondering where she was hiding her talent. Leroux mentions some performances that I am completely blanking on here, but suffice it to say Christine is now being heralded as one of the best singers ever. And then Leroux throws in another character, Raoul who watches Christine perform and is all, hey I used to play with her as a kid. Yeah this is just a long and winding way to say that we now have the opera ghost who we find out is a man named Erik, Christine, and Raoul all introduced. From there the story jumps into tales of love and obsession and how Erik came to be there. 

I don't like love triangles since that always seems to me to be an easy way to write a romance. Oh there's a young woman who is seemingly perfect and now she must choose between two uber perfect men.

Well in this case, one man who is obsessed with Christine to the point he's cool with murdering others and then forcing her to stay with him. 

And then we have Raoul, who honestly didn't do a thing for me.

I found Christine to be beyond naive though and her flip flopping about Erik just got to be too much for me. The man is threatening to keep her with him always and force her to marry him. That's not even a little bit of love. And how dumb was she that she didn't know who her "angel" was and who the phantom was? I could not get over that. 

There are other characters in this one, actually a lot, but no one really stands out to me. I found myself going through the motions to just finish this to get done. 

The writing was pretty stilted and I think that was probably due to the translations though. I always end up feeling confused if I read a novel that has been translated, and this one definitely had me wondering if that is the word or dialogue that Leroux originally met. Also I have to wonder if Leroux wanted readers to loathe Erik or what. I know I did. 

The flow was bad in this one. There just needed to be some tighter editing. This is over 300 pages and I literally felt each page. Usually I can fly through a read like this, but this whole book took ages (Thursday through last night) for me to finish. I ended up reading other books to just break this one up. 

The ending was a foregone conclusion and I was just glad to be done. 

I started this book this morning and then my Kindle died. I should probably take that as a sign. So far not that interested in the characters going on about a "ghost." There's a man found hung and there's claims the ghost did it.

TITLE:  The Phantom of the Opera

AUTHOR:  Gaston Leroux

TRANSLATOR:  David Coward

FORMAT:  Paperback

ISBN-13:  9780199694570

EDITION:  Oxford World's Classics

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DESCRIPTION:

"First published in French as a serial in 1909, "The Phantom of the Opera" is a riveting story that revolves around the young, Swedish Christine Daaé. Her father, a famous musician, dies, and she is raised in the Paris Opera House with his dying promise of a protective angel of music to guide her. After a time at the opera house, she begins hearing a voice, who eventually teaches her how to sing beautifully. All goes well until Christine's childhood friend Raoul comes to visit his parents, who are patrons of the opera, and he sees Christine when she begins successfully singing on the stage. The voice, who is the deformed, murderous 'ghost' of the opera house named Erik, however, grows violent in his terrible jealousy, until Christine suddenly disappears. The phantom is in love, but it can only spell disaster. Leroux's work, with characters ranging from the spoiled prima donna Carlotta to the mysterious Persian from Erik's past, has been immortalized by memorable adaptations. Despite this, it remains a remarkable piece of Gothic horror literature in and of itself, deeper and darker than any version that follows."

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This is another one of those foreign language (French) novels that has a dozen awful translations with omissions and additions.  The new translation by David Coward is supposed to be true to the original.  I found no complaints with the style of the translation and the notes to be quite helpful.  The story itself is a love story/Gothic horror that differs a fair amount from Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical production.  Interesting and entertaining.

I read this with the serial reader app. I love how accessible it makes classic books. You get a small portion of the book each day, and before you know it... you're done. I even find myself reading ahead from time to time to see what happens next.

I never read this one before and I never even saw the musical. I listened to the music and loved it, but that was all.

This was a good story and I enjoyed reading it. The Opera Ghost is always a mystery, but the other characters are interesting - though not enough to really get attached to. I was on the edge of my seat at the end, waiting to see who would survive.

Well, that was crappy. Things do happen in this novel, and yet, it somehow manages to be completely anticlimactic. How? Everything important happens "off-screen" to characters Leroux never bothered to even consider that someone would want to read about, despite being the lead characters in the novel. No, instead, let's have chapter upon chapter in first-person from the point of view of a character that's barely been introduced until the last third of the novel when he's narrating! Erik and Christine? PHHHT! Who'd want to read about the main protagonist/antagonist?! The most interesting chapter in the damn thing is when Christine describes being taken underground by the "Angel," and even then, it's waaaaaay after the fact. I suppose Leroux thought he was creating mystery and suspense. It doesn't work. I can't imagine how this was published as a serial, when no chapter left me wanting more.

The characters are insufferable. The only one I felt mildly for was Christine, who had to deal with Raoul's bratty behavior, and Erik's homicidal stalking, the managers not really caring that she disappears and suspecting her of orchestrating some of Erik's tricks, Carlotta's loyal audience giving her a hard time every time she sings... I had a basic female empathy for her, even when she was being frustratingly naive. Raoul can go eat a bag of turds for life; Leroux tried to excuse his behavior by telling us it's his inexperience in love. Generally an inexperienced person doesn't accuse the person he loves of being an unfaithful whore every other sentence, as she's trying to confess what happened. Sighs. And Erik... just forget it.

All of it is written as an investigation of mysterious events that transpired at the Opera, making it rather a precursor to modern procedurals, but also making it distant and difficult to care about anyone. It's one saving grace is how short it is.

So why is my rating so generous? Well... I said 'its one saving grace,' but it has another, and that's that Leroux came up with an idea so fantastical, so lurid and interesting, that a hundred and five years later, it still belongs in our public consciousness. He did it poorly, but it's inspired so many adaptations, so many people to take the bare bones of what he laid out and elaborate on. And that is more than a noteworthy feat.

My Modern Library edition also includes an analysis of the text, which discusses such things as antisemitism and Freudian psychology. Which I feel is giving far too much credit. And also an introduction by Anne Perry, which just creeped me the hell out with her rhetoric espousing sympathetic killers.