You can feel the emotion pouring from every crevice of this book. Definitely different from the musical, but just as original, moving, and dramatic.

I had heard that the original Phantom of the Opera novel is far more horror-based and intense than the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical I am familiar with, so I was curious to see for myself just how different the two stories are from each other.

Mostly, I wanted to see what Erik's deal was because he has so much more going on than what the adaptations of the character that I'm familiar with touch on. Now that I have listened to the entire book and its epilogue, I'd say that the best way to describe Leroux's Phantom is "the character whose OP backstory was created after the main story was written in order to explain how the mystery worked and prove that it was just a man the entire time!" but it honestly leaves me with more questions than answers. I also really wasn't fond of the sentiment about birth deformities being a sign of inherent inner evil to be pitied by the "beautiful" people of the world, so I don't really know what to make of that regarding Erik's character development at the end.

That being said, the novel was rather boring in how it mostly consisted of uneventful exposition dumps until the story picks up about halfway through when the Phantom and the Persian take more prominent roles. Their part of the story is still mostly large exposition dumps, but at least those dumps were entertaining in how absolutely buck wild they are. My main complaint is that having to follow a whiny, self-entitled Raoul around through the eyes of the narrator was so draining because he is a prime example of the Nice Guy trope and I can't really say I was rooting for him like we're so clearly supposed to.

It was fun to spot all of the story/character notes that the musical plucked out when reworking the plot into more of a dark romance. Having experienced Leroux's original work, I now have a greater appreciation for adaptations that play around with the fun and interesting concepts that are laid out in the novel.

So, The Phantom of the Opera is my favorite musical. I watched it for the first time in middle school choir and fell in love with the music and the story. I forced my family to watch it with me and I got a copy of the 2004 movie for Christmas the next year.

Now, I knew going into this book that it was going to be vastly different from the musical. I knew that, I really did. However, for some strange reason I was still so shocked at all the differences between this book and the musical. But I did love seeing scenes from the book that inspired specific scenes in the musical and playing the music in the background helped as well. I would HIGHLY recommend listening to the music scores of The Phantom of the Opera while reading this book because it made the experience so much better for me.

The way that this book was written had me constantly having to remind myself that it was a work of fiction, because the small pieces of ‘historical’ items really made it seem like this happened and I almost googled some of the events and people. *hides face in hands* I feel that the author really did a good job at making a book that didn’t feel like fiction while also being such an elaborate and crazy story.

I give The Phantom of the Opera 4 stars. I’m not taking away points for it not being like what I’m used to. I’m taking away some points because I just...didn’t like Raoul in the beginning, and still wasn’t his biggest fan at the end. Sometimes the things that he said or the things he did took away from me enjoying it. But other than that, a really fun read. I’m going to go and watch my movie again now!