Every dark romance you have ever read learned something from this book.

Published in 1910, The Phantom of the Opera invented an archetype that has never gone away: the brilliant, monstrous man who loves with a violence that destroys everything it touches, including himself. Gaston Leroux was not writing a love story. He was writing about obsession — the kind that builds an underground palace for a woman who does not know you exist, that fills it with music, and that cannot understand why she is afraid.

The Phantom — He lives beneath the Paris Opéra, in the darkness below five basements, in rooms he built with his own hands. He has a voice that makes singers weep and a face he has hidden since childhood. He has been watching Christine Daaé for years. Now he has decided she will be his.

Christine Daaé — She believes the voice teaching her to sing belongs to the Angel of Music her dead father promised to send. She is not entirely wrong.

Raoul de Chagny — He loves Christine simply and completely, the way people love when they have never had reason to doubt that love is enough. It is not.

The novel moves between the glittering surface of the Opéra and the labyrinth beneath it — between a world of chandeliers and applause and a world of traps, mirrors, and a man who has made his suffering into architecture.

✦ Complete and unabridged — the full original text, in a new English translation.

This edition also contains:

✦ About the Author — a critical biography of Gaston Leroux: the journalist who covered the Dreyfus affair, created the first great detective of French fiction, and then wrote the novel that outlived everything else he ever did

For readers who enjoy:

✦ Gothic dark romance with literary origins ✦ Obsessive, morally complex antiheroes ✦ Classic horror and mystery fiction (Poe, Stoker, Conan Doyle) ✦ The original story behind the most successful musical in theatre history

He was not a ghost. He was a man who had been treated like one for so long that he had forgotten the difference. That is not a gothic detail. That is the whole story.