Oh, my. Where to begin?

Mystery at the Opera House by Brigitta D'Arcy, 2003

(Originally published as Le Fantome, 1999

Grade: D

This is the very first of the long, long procession of self- or vanity-published novels to come. There's a prevalent perception out there that self-published novels are, by default, substandard in terms of quality and literary merit, the thinking being that if they had that much merit, they'd have been published by an established publishing house. This is not always true; there are many authors that, for one reason or another, prefer to go the self-publishing route despite having written an enjoyable piece of literature. I'll be doing my utmost not to assume that every self-published book on my list is sub-par, and to give the most even-handed look to each one that I can.

That said... this book sucked.

Things start to get wonky right out of the gate, with the author's note. D'Arcy (whose name makes me smile--a pen name in homage of the right bastard from the 1962 Fisher/Lom film, perhaps? I don't know, but I approve if that's the case) leaps right in with telling us a very familiar story, which she claims is an account of the true events of the life of the man upon whom Leroux based his Phantom. Oddly enough, this story seems to share the vast majority of its key points and material with the plot of Kay's 1990 novel. It is also entirely new to me, which was something of a point for pondering, since I figured if there were a real story that so closely coincided with Leroux's tale, someone (Wolf, for example, in his copious footnotes) would have mentioned it before now.

However, she cited her source. Oh, happy day! This story came to her from an article written by one Madame Renata de Waele, the public relations agent for the Opera Garnier in 1999. Off to the internet I toddled, the better to learn more about this astonishingly familiar historical account. D'Arcy does not provide the name of this article in her author's note, nor does she cite any information on it in her reading list at the back, but some studious research turned up the fact that it's entitled "La veritable histoire du Fantome de l'Opera" ("The True History of the Phantom of the Opera") and was published in France in the Journal Illustre du Cafe de la Paix, presumably as promotion for the Opera Garnier. So far, so good... except that I only speak a little French. Even I can tell, however, that there are no sources cited for this article, which starts my academic little hackles to raising. So more internet digging turned up a few pages from the article here at forever77's blog (incidentally, said blogger has been an awesome help so far in this project), as well as a few emails regarding the sources... of which, again, there ain't none. Hmm. De Waele does appear to have been an Opera Garnier employee at one point, as she turned up mentioned in a few other articles involving that venerable old playhouse, but there seems to be absolutely no substantiation for her story.

Oh, ye budding literary artists of the world: when you state that something is true and factual, you must cite sources. You must! Make up whatever crazy shit you want in fiction, but if you're going to write nonfiction articles or claim that your fiction is based in fact, you must have actual... well, fact to back that up with. Believing a story to be true is one thing, but if you can't prove it reasonably to your audience, you really can't claim it to be fact. Unfortunately, for all of D'Arcy's impassioned declarations regarding the veracity of de Waele's account, it seems to be pretty much utter poppycock, and pretty identifiably based on Kay's novel (Erik lives with an abusive/neglectful mother until boyhood, is then captured and put on display in a circus, escaped and went to Persia in his teen years to work for the Shah's court as an architect and curiosity, went back to France as an adult and collaborated with Garnier on the building of the opera house, and so on and so forth). There is also a persistent description of Erik's face as "asymmetrical"; for quite a lot of the novel, I thought that this meant he had a half-face deformity a la Webber, which assumption was backed up by D'Arcy's gushing appreciation of said musical, which she refers to in an interview as "[bringing] to life the Phantom's story" (sorry, Leroux... no love for you today, either). There was actually a description in a much later chapter, however, that seemed to indicate that the deformity was more widespread than that; however, the story itself is still a very obvious combination of elements from the Webber musical and the Kay novel, with a basic but unremarkable foundation in the original book by Leroux.

The preface starts to be even more fun when, in a footnote (learn to love the footnotes: they will be back!), she mentions that she has included a list of books for further reading, in case some of us readers happen to be a little bit on the dense side when it comes to understanding what she's talking about. Since this footnote is in reference to her discussion of something called a "soul rescue", count me in on the dense side. Don't worry... this will be back to haunt us (literally) later.

More interesting in a scholarly sense, however, is her mention of what seems to be one of the key elements of many sequels and spin-offs of this particular story: that is, the idea that Erik should be compensated or otherwise receive some sort of reward for having such a shitty time of things. She says, "[The book] is written around these facts and tells of the last tormented days of Erik's life, his death and the lovely soul rescue which compensated him in some way for all the suffering and torture he had to endure during his lifetime." Leaving aside the mention of unsubstantiated facts and the bewildering reference to the soul rescue, this is an idea that seems to underlie a lot of derivative literature for this particular novel; I'm not sure if it's a cultural feeling that equates suffering with virtue that deserves reward, or just a general sense of reader identification with a character and a desire to see him "treated fairly", but it will become much more prevalent as we continue our chronological look at these sources.

The other notable feature of the preface is an extended mention of Joseph Carey Merrick, better known as the Elephant Man; while it's very true that his lifetime and the version of the Phantom story presented by D'Arcy have quite a few similarities, he was a real, verified person.

So, now, I already have serious problems with the foundation and author's statements. But what about the writing? If it's well-written, all can be forgiven.

Chapter 1:

First sentence: lack of necessary comma. Dammit. In fact, D'Arcy suffers from a little bit of Comma Disorder throughout the text; commas are sometimes missing in places that they really should be included, such as between adjectives, while at other times they jump in to gleefully splice an otherwise unsuspecting sentence. It's not so heinously widespread as to render the book unreadable, but it certainly detracts from my experience when I groan every other paragraph. There is also a recurring problem with overuse of ellipses, and the paragraphs and sentences in general suffer from a choppy, flow-inhibiting shortness that doesn't do much to enhance the story D'Arcy is trying to tell.

And as for that story? Well... I'm underwhelmed. The first chapter appears to be equal parts rehashing of the end of Leroux's novel and general emo whining on Erik's part over how unfortunate his life is (this is not helped by the fact that D'Arcy already rehashed the end of the novel in her preface). Erik spends his time vacillating between hatred of the human race and self-pitying moaning over Christine's failure to love him because of his face; while this is perfectly adequate for the original character (the overwrought prose describing it is not, but I digress), it completely ignores the fact that Erik achieved a sort of redemption and understanding at the end of Leroux's novel. D'Arcy's Erik has apparently completely failed to learn or take anything away from the events of the novel, completely axing Leroux's parable of transcendence and redemption and plunking the character right back down where he started, but with a reduction in his murderous insanity and a heaping dollop of extra angst. I was not impressed. The melodrama of it all seriously undercuts the idea of there being any dignity to the character, even when D'Arcy is insisting that he is dignified, and the implied spiritual peace of the original character's end is totally absent.

D'Arcy's Erik is an opium addict (again, very reminiscent of Kay's version of the character), which mostly serves to confuse me when he flies into histrionic fits shortly after smoking a pipe, what with opium being a soporific and all. But I suppose the chapter needed some more hysterical weeping and ranting.

There's more Kay influence here, as well, when Erik suffers flashbacks to his mother screaming and abusing him for failing to wear his mask. While this is not precisely the way Madeleine behaved in Kay's novel, of course, that isn't particularly surprising; since de Waele's article appears to be based on Kay and D'Arcy's novel is based upon the article, she's getting the elements of Kay's novel in a filtered, distorted form. In fact, it's entirely possible that the author is unaware that this secondhand Kay influence is present at all.

(As a side note: I'm making an assumption here that de Waele's article is based partially on Kay's text, as they share more than a few marked similarities. However, it is also possible that they're not related, which provides some interesting food for thought when it comes to pondering why two separate authors would come up with the same idea at the same time. As I said when something similar happened with the concurrently appearing mother figures of the 1990 Richardson/Dance miniseries and Kay's novel, the total absence of mother figures in Leroux's original work seems to strike a serious chord in many interpreters and sequel-writers; in particular, there seems to be a trend of ignoring Christine's functioning in that role in order to preserve her as a romantic prospect only. Perhaps the implied-incest-subtext is subconsciously uncomfortable for these writers... or maybe they just look at a story that intentionally omitted mother figures and see a hole that wants to be filled.)

This is all very interesting from a scholarly point of view, but the self-pitying, overly-maudlin monologues that D'Arcy's Erik insists on constantly indulging in are not. They are, in fact, a trial to read; while I understand that the author is attempting to convey the depth of the character's unhappiness, all she's really conveying to me is the depth of his capacity to whine. Particularly irksome is a trend--beginning now and extending to later chapters--that has Erik bemoaning the fact that Christine could not look beyond his face and love him. This is a clear indicator that D'Arcy missed the point of the redemption at the end of Leroux's novel--it was Erik's own ability to look past his deformity that was finally achieved when he released Christine and achieved his own, personal redemption. This Erik has apparently rejected that metaphorical salvation, enabled and affirmed by Christine's acceptance, and chosen instead to whinge hysterically about the ills he has suffered at the hands of mankind. It's tiresome.

Chapter 2:

The details that D'Arcy includes are sometimes a little on the bizarre side; for example, I don't know exactly what Erik's deformity looks like, even after reading the entire novel, but I do know that he has a monogrammed bathrobe, and I could give you a stunningly detailed list of his wardrobe. Wardrobe over-description is a trap that many a writer falls into; in my opinion, you want the reader to be able to visualize the character, yes--but you don't want them to feel that you're playing dress-up instead of advancing the plot. Of course, there's not a lot of plot here, really.

It's worth noting that Christine, in one of Erik's flashbacks, has dark hair, which again indicates influence from the Webber musical and its tradition, starting with Sarah Brightman, of mostly brunette Christines.

D'Arcy begins to introduce the idea that Erik is in failing health here; however, it was more than a little bit contradictory and inconsistent. One moment he's strong enough to splinter the arms of a theatre seat just by squeezing them, and the next he's out of breath and having a heart attack from running down the stairs. The heart episodes recur frequently over the next few chapters, but are frustratingly vague in their symptoms, leaving me to wonder what, exactly, is wrong with him.

Erik uses a tincture of digitalis to medicate his heart problems; this isn't medically unsound for the time period, but the fact that she kept referring to it as "tinct digitalis" without the period indicating an abbreviation drove me nuts.

Chapter 3:

I've bitched about this before in other works (I'm looking at you again, Siciliano), but here it is again in all its glory: the wanton, yet inconsistent, overuse of the French language. Much to my dismay, D'Arcy persists in writing every line of spoken dialogue in French (for the first part of the book, anyway; later chapters begin to intersperse spoken English at seemingly random intervals). This is a bad idea for a few reasons. For one thing, it excludes those readers that are not fluent in French from knowing what's going on; I happened to know enough to fake my way through the sentence and get the gist of it, but if I hadn't, I'd have been even more inclined to stop reading this book than I already was. For another, it's totally nonsensical. The character is French. The book is set in France. We, the readers, already know this; therefore, it is not necessary, barring special circumstances, to use any French in the novel (which is written by and for English-speakers). Erik's internal monologues, extensive as they are, are presumably in French, but we get to read those in English. None of the French lines' meanings are contingent upon their native language (they're mostly just passing conversation); their inclusion just smacks of a lazy way to inject "Frenchness" into the writing without actually including anything culture-specific (which is a shame, since one of the things D'Arcy does do well is provide fairly convincing period settings), and the fact that D'Arcy doesn't bother to translate any of them excludes readers who may be curious as to what the hell everyone is talking about.

There continues to be a bewildering amount of detail in areas that it really doesn't need to be present... such as Erik preparing dinner. Mesmerizing as recipes may be to some people, unless you're writing Like Water for Chocolate, they seldom flow well into a narrative.

Erik's internal monologue makes mention of the fact that the one thing he wants most is "...the lady who would share his life... his soulmate..." This is in sharp contrast to the original Erik, who--though he obviously wanted Christine--wanted more to be accepted by the society which had rejected him and to prove to himself and said society that he had worth as a human being. Distilling the original character's complex motives down to just "He needs him a lady!" seems unnecessary and detrimental to the subtext of the story.

Chapter 4:

I just want to mention that D'Arcy likes to start every chapter with a bit of poetry. It's usually Shakespeare, but now and then she intersperses her own bits of verse. God knows I'm not a poetry critic, and it doesn't strike me as terrible or anything... but Shakespeare she definitely ain't.

There are more minor grammatical crimes in this chapter, mostly having to do with comma misplacement and more abuse of ellipses. Additionally, there is some obvious borrowing of wording from Webber's libretto--nothing overly blatant, but it's noticeable nevertheless.

Erik goes off on an extended questioning-the-existence-of-God jag here, which is another marked difference from Leroux's original character (who didn't like God overly much--in fact, usually claimed to hate him--but who definitely believed in him). Again the simplification of a layered character with a complex antagonistic relationship with his faith down to a cranky, self-pitying whiner didn't do a whole lot for me. Additionally, I was confused--if this Erik isn't Catholic and questions the very existence of God, why doesn't he stop bitching about, "Oh, happy death, hurry up, etc. etc." and just kill himself? It's not like he's got that Catholic worry about mortal sins to fret over. He could just drink all the laudanum he keeps dosing himself with and put both of us out of our miseries.

A flashback to his days in Persia again displays marked secondhand influence from Kay, but presents seriously conflicting character problems. Somehow, I have trouble taking Erik's assertion that building the sultana's torture chamber "sickened him to his innermost being" when he was mere paragraphs ago discussing how much he wanted to murder Raoul, and when he has built an exact replica of said torture chamber in his house and uses it on intruders. The action does not jibe with the statement. I also had a good giggle over the fact that he apparently has nerve gas in said torture chamber, as he uses it on a wandering stagehand rather than frying him; dude, why did he not use that in the original story? It would have been so useful.

Also, this is an opera house we're talking about, not a rotating dinner theatre. Ain't nobody putting on Faust the day after they put on Don Giovanni. I'd charitably assume that we caught the opera house on the very week they switched over shows, but then they're suddenly performing Bellini's Norma a few days later, so there's really no way to justify that as anything other than sloppiness. I do appreciate, however, that all three shows were used or mentioned in Leroux's novel.

Chapter 5:

Despite D'Arcy's predilection for using French at the drop of a hat, I see that the libretto of Gounod's Faust has mysteriously been transposed to English for this performance. How odd.

The prose becomes so purple in this chapter that it actually begins to impede my ability, as a reader, to know what's going on. His voice was so beautiful that it "made the very stones weep," eh? Was it messy? "He did not appear to be in the room anymore" from the power of his song? Did he vanish? And while I'm criticizing the prose, for the love of god, I can't take any more switching from present to past to present again. Please, let's just pick a tense and stick with it.

Now is the point in the novel where the weirdness begins. Erik feels some kind of warm, ghostly light... or presence... or something. There is no explanation for this, and he seems not to worry about it too much. I would be all about this being some kind of ghost, but after the author's preface, I doubt that this is anything so classical as a haunting.

The only other thing of note was the fact that, after drinking three glasses of wine (but magically, somehow, not being even a little bit drunk), Erik took his misericordia upstairs with him and D'Arcy thoughtfully provided the full definition of the word in the text, just in case any of us were incapable of safely operating a dictionary. Gotta say, it really made the sentence flow.

Chapter 6:

The opera house, apparently, felt the need to bring the performance to a screeching halt so everyone in the entire house could point and shriek at Erik in his box. Never mind that most of these people paid a good sum of money to be here, or that boxes are intentionally difficult to see into; they seen an op'ry ghost, ma, and there's gonna be huntin' tonight. I also don't think much of the opera cast that stopped dead in their performance due to a little audience disturbance. Where has professionalism gone? Erik's bitter and unnecessary-dwelt-upon memories of the previous Hunt for the Opera Ghost are, obviously, entirely borrowed from the Webber musical, as no such mob-hunt occurred in Leroux's novel (the mob chase first appeared in the 1925 Julian/Chaney film, but I don't see much influence from that particular source in D'Arcy's book anywhere).

Sigh. Now we've had some dialogue in English, but Erik's thinking in French. The goal must be to make readers want to smack their foreheads into furniture. And there's more overuse of ellipses, and more instances of thinly-disguised song lyrics, and an example of the past participle being used in place of the simple past. By this point, I was kind of twitching, and I was only six chapters into the blasted thing.

The only description we're going to get of Erik's deformity is here, and it's a little bit vague; the mention of his sunken eye sockets and overall thinness suggest a similar condition to Leroux's Erik's, but D'Arcy's Phantom also has a nose and that persistent descriptor "asymmetrical", which sounds more like Webber's version of the character. In the end, I can't tell. Luckily, it won't really impact Erik's ability to whine endlessly about it, so the book doesn't suffer any more than it's already doing.

Ah, author's notes, just tossed into the text willy-nilly. There really aren't a lot of writing conventions that can yank a reader out of the flow of the story faster or more brutally, or that make me more inclined to go do something more enjoyable, like mopping the kitchen. D'Arcy's helpful note, "The story continues in Erik's own words," is random and unnecessary. So what if it seems to serve little purpose, wasn't in the slightest bit integrated into the text and confuses the hell out of the readers? Fuck 'em. They've read this far. They're clearly gluttons for punishment. Even worse, now that Erik's narrating flashbacks and doing things at the same time, there's yet more tense confusion since D'Arcy fails to make a clear distinction between Erik's thoughts and his actual actions. This perspective shift could have been done (many authors shift perspective all the time), but almost any other execution would have been less clumsy and off-putting.

Chapter 7:

Another recurring grammatical error makes its triumphant debut. Periods are not equal to question marks. One is used for sentence ends; the other for question ends. They are not interchangeable.

Erik continues to mope around about his impending death (which is still coming with agonizing slowness for me, since at this point I just want the book to end), and decides that his secret garden of plant life (oho! Do I spy some influence from the 1990 Richardson/Dance miniseries? Maybe, but there don't seem to be any other instances of it in the rest of the novel) needs to be transplanted up to the streets of Paris so that it doesn't perish with him. I was unable to focus on the intended poignancy of his midnight gardening exploits due to the total ludicrousness of the idea that he had been growing orange trees, underground, and now expected them to flourish in Parisian weather. Patent impossibilities have a way of ruining my suspension of disbelief.

I haven't mentioned the footnotes in a while, have I? THERE ARE FOOTNOTES TO THE TEXT EVERY CHAPTER AND IT IS REALLY ANNOYING, ESPECIALLY SINCE THEY DON'T ADD MUCH TO THE TEXT, AT ALL.

Chapter 8:

Erik heads off to visit Garnier (again, we see the diluted Kay influence), who apparently has joined him in rejecting Catholicism because he seems to believe in reincarnation (maybe he's a Freemason! ...see what I did there?). The visit is really just more fodder for more whiny monologues about the suffering of his life. Sigh.

The constant wailing of "Why?" by Erik, in particular, really gets under my skin; it undermines the character's intellect and drive a lot. The original Erik didn't like the reasons for his expulsion from normal society, but he understood what they were; likewise, once he stopped trying to fool himself, he had few illusions about Christine's motives and actions. Erik doesn't have to scream "Why?"--he knows why, even though he may not believe those are valid reasons. D'Arcy's Erik, apparently, is a little bit slow on the uptake.

Chapter 9:

Erik finally gets around to killing himself here, to which I say, bravo. Thank goodness. Finally. Unfortunately, he still has to go through the hackneyed, "Hey, I should be dead! Whoa, is that my body?" routine that just about every ghost in popular media goes through at the time of their death.

You'd think that that would be all right, though, because he's dead. So the book is over, right? ...how the hell can there still be five or six chapters left to go? Sigh.

Some helpful footnotes on astral bodies are introduced here. They are textbook unsubstantiated science, and give us a clue as to the silliness to come.

Chapter 10:

More footnotes on astral theory abound, but luckily, you can ignore these in favor of hooting in glee with me when Erik suddenly goes, "Oh, shit, I forgot I was telekinetic and can move stuff with my mind. Always been able to do that. Just didn't come up in the story before now." The sheer randomness of this thrown-in-for-no-good-reason insanity kept me laughing almost as long as its clumsy presentation did (seriously, it was just like, "And then I remembered that I was telekinetic..."). Bizarrely, a few seconds later, Erik throws a monumental hissy fit when he realizes that he's dead and can't play his instruments anymore. Maybe he has some kind of mental block when it comes to his telekinesis that causes him to forget about it every few minutes. That might explain its weird and random appearances and disappearances.

More footnotes. It's not that I hate footnotes--I think that there are usually better ways to insert information in a narrative, but I've seen footnotes used well in fiction--but that I hate these footnotes. They're often so unnecessary to the story; that's what gets me. It's worse than when I complained about Wolf's occasionally unnecessary footnotes; at least he had an academic context for them.

Chapter 11:

More comma splicing. Sigh.

There's been a lot of talk, up to this point, about Erik's "musical play" about his life that he's been writing, entitled Angel of Music. First of all: horseshit. Somehow, I can't really see Erik composing vaudevilles when he's been an architect of grand opera up until this point. And second, I'm confused as to why Erik needs to write another piece, musical or opera, about his life. It seems that the subtext of Erik's version of Don Juan Triumphant is lost on D'Arcy, or else she is intentionally ignoring it; the entire point of Leroux choosing that particular story for Erik's opera is to suggest that Erik himself identifies with the story and has composed the opera for it as a testament to his own life as well as the original story (even his lines bear this out, what with all that, "I am a sort of Don Juan, you know," going on, not to mention the not-very-subtle subtext of his statement that he will die when the work is completed).

But, at any rate, D'Arcy's Erik feels the need to compose a "musical play" about his life in much more overt and unsubtle terms, so Angel of Music is born. And then--lo! Erik sings his "musical play" to the sky as a ghost for some reason or other, and behold!

"And so the score of Erik's music floated up and was emblazoned on the ether, from whence, many years later, it was picked up by a gifted musician and made into a play." (page 88, not even kidding)

Feel free to join me in hysterical giggling; I haven't really stopped since I realized that D'Arcy was suggesting that Erik himself (who really existed, remember--de Waele said so) wrote Webber's musical and that the British composer was merely a hapless conduit. Even if I could quell the ridiculousness of the premise long enough to focus, I'd still be unable to go with this assertion; I'll be the first to say that I thoroughly enjoy Webber's musical, but Erik (according to both Leroux and D'Arcy herself) is supposed to be a composer without equal. Webber ain't no Wagner, or Puccini, or Verdi. I have difficulty believing that he is representative of a composing talent yet greater.

After a brief pause for me to rant some more about question marks and their proper usage, the story glided along and workers broke into the bricked-up quarters that once belonged to Erik, coming across his body and generally milling in panic (it should be noted here, however, that there were actual workers sealing records in the vaults of the opera; in fact, said records were just recently excavated and restored for modern listeners; this part of D'Arcy's history may be skewed, but it does have a basis in proven fact). I was confused by their minute inspection of Erik's body and their discussion of his deformity; didn't he, you know, rot in the last 25 years? It typically only takes about fifty days for a body to entirely rot down to the bones and gristle phase, and even if Erik's living quarters were dry enough to mummify him, I wouldn't think there'd have been that many recognizable features left, ugly or otherwise. But, as I remind myself frequently in this project, who cares what I think?

Before we dive into chapter twelve, let me share with you the author's note page that forms a small break between the previous chapter and this one. It reads as follows:

"Although the second part of this story, which occurred a century later, may sound like a journey into utter fantasy, it is nevertheless based on fact."

Oh. Well, good. And here I was worried that it was going to be batshit crazy or something. I'm so relieved now.

Chapter 12:

Let the Webber fangirling begin. The entire beginning of the chapter concerns an unnamed woman (so TOTALLY NOT D'ARCY'S SELF-INSERT, GUYS) who attends the Webber musical and is moved to uncontrollable emotion, etc. Erik does not have the monopoly on overly maudlin monologues, it seems. More footnotes continue, mostly concerning things like astral travel and auras and whatever other new-age concepts D'Arcy felt like including. These are necessary because Erik somehow manages to spontaneously time-travel in ghost form (none of this waiting around for a century because as a ghost he can't die malarkey... no, he needs to time travel straight to 1991. Only non-Erik ghosts are chumps enough to wait around in torment and haunt things) and find this mysterious woman and start ghost-stalking her, so of course as readers we need to understand all this bullshit about how the metaphysical world works. The book has pretty much given up trying by this point; Erik acclimates to his new century without even the slightest of blips, he discovers a magical telepathic ability to spy on and communicate with this chick, and discovers that she loves him. She totally LOVES him from seeing the Webber stage show... real love, folks. For real. For serious. He, of course, is BOWLED OVER by this because nobody has ever loved him before (sob)! And she, of course, thanks the Beings of Light (there is copious mention of them. They are not explained) for sending him to her in her own century (le gasp)! It's like The Ghost Whisperer, but even more ridiculous and poorly scripted.

Aside from the obvious turn into insanity that this book has taken (seriously, how the hell did we even get here?), this entire thing is depressing because it's something of a reiteration of the end of Leroux's novel. D'Arcy has ignored Erik's redemption via Christine in favor of letting this random twentieth-century woman (NOT A SELF-INSERT) do it instead. I can't come up with a good reason for reiterating Erik's redemption so obviously, or for the truly bizarre plot shenanigans that were required to bring it about (unless we assume that this is all a self-indulgent fantasy on the part of the author). The only thing I can think is that perhaps this anonymous woman gets to enact the REAL salvation of Erik because she isn't running off with Raoul like a trollop. Or something. I've got nothing.

Chapter 13:

This chapter is only notable for a lot of really bad poetry and some further rape of Shakespeare. Because Erik and this chick are totally, like, soulmates. For reals.

Chapter 14:

Erik states unequivocally, "Her love has redeemed me." I'd talk some more about how Christine already did this, but I'd just be repeating myself.

And now this woman has a prolonged fantasy about Erik's ascension and how he totally is her soulmate and when she dies they'll be together forever and also his face transforms and becomes breathtakingly beautiful which is totally NOT counter to the point of loving him in spite of his imperfections and then, finally, we have reached the end. Except for some more bad poetry (this time ostensibly written by Erik!).

Epilogue:

There's not much going on here, except for this hysterically funny note: "Warning: It is not recommended that anyone attempts soul rescue without some form of training or knowledge thereof." That's right, kids. Don't try this at home. Somebody could get hurt... apparently.

Still confused about what the fuck all this foaming craziness about astral projection and soul rescues and Beings of Light is about? Never fear: D'Arcy has provided a reading list for those of us that are a little more batshit-challenged than others. Entertainingly, Leroux made the list... at the very bottom.

Hey, if you believe in this stuff, good for you. I'm not here to dump on anyone's religion/spirituality/faith/whatever. But even if you ignore all of my objections on that score, the book still had next to no plot and a host of frankly painful writing problems. I would never have finished it I hadn't been doing it for a project. That's right. I suffered for you, the reader. Now I'm going to go have a nice bath and a nice dinner and forget all about it.