Christine is fascinated by the voice of the "Angel of Music", and he trains her to be a great singer at the opera. When Christine is reunited with her childhood friend, Raoul, they discover that the Angel of Music is really the dreaded Phantom, who has terrorized the Opera House for many years. Raoul wants to protect Christine, but she feels pity intermingled with fear for the Phantom, and cannot bring herself to betray him.

This book is so deliciously gothic! I love the wild melodrama and the super-emotional characters. The plot is full of mystery and dramatic scenes. There is a nasty ratcatcher with a swarm of rats that follow him through the spaces between the walls of the opera house. There is a mystic shade that has a fiery death head that seems to float above the ground in flames. And there are various corpses and blood and skeletons in deep underground tunnels. You have to have at least one skeleton or corpse in a gothic book; it's a requirement of the genre!

The Phantom himself is everywhere in the Opera House, spying on everyone. He hears everything and seems to appear by magic in locked rooms. I found all these machinations really interesting, especially later in the book as we learn how he pulled off all his illusions and tricks. At first, you think he might just be a villain, but as you read more of his dialogue it becomes evident that he is utterly insane. Like, this dude has completely lost his reason. No doubt he's a genius, but a mad genius.

I was surprised that most of the story is told from Raoul's perspective.  I thought it would be more of Christine, but our intrepid hero is the one driving the action of the plot. I just adore Raoul! I especially loved the descriptions of how Raoul and Christine were friends as children. Super cute and sweet! Raoul is so brave and determined. He is very foolish sometimes and acts impetuously, but he has a good heart. He is all light and goodness, whereas the Phantom is pure darkness and evil. 

Christine is a really complex character. She is sort of brainwashed at the beginning, but even after she knows the "Angel of Music" is actually the murderous Phantom, she has such a strong pity for him, such a deep compassion, that she can't quite give up on him. She doesn't want to hurt him, knowing how he is obsessed with her. In every other scene, she changes her mind. She is terrified of the Phantom, but she is attracted to his beautiful music. She hates him, but she wants to show him kindness. I think this inconsistency shows how she is warring within herself between the dark and light sides of her own personality. She has to choose between the men in her life, and that is like choosing between different sides of her own heart.

The writing is sort of round-about and backwards because it starts out telling us about a police investigation into all the people who were murdered by the Phantom. So we already know that certain people are going to die at some point in the plot. Then it goes into these letters and reports from various of the characters and how the author gleaned their stories and testimony about the Phantom. So we already know the ending for those characters. Then we finally launch into our main story, which is mostly told from Raoul's perspective beginning from when he reconnects with Christine at the Opera. Then the last part of the story is told from the perspective of a Persian who knew the Phantom's tragic backstory. The Persian assists Raoul to navigate the underground tunnels in search of the Phantom's lair to rescue Christine, and so we hear all the final drama from the Persian's testimony which abruptly ends right when they are about to die. Then we hear the final ending from various reports and some conjecture and from a final testimony that the author heard from the Persian about how they escaped. 
This storytelling structure is all over the place! It's all so random and chaotic. But it's fine; it works. The pacing is decent, but not great. The writing definitely captures your attention with all the mysterious and weird things going on.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book, and the corpses and scary scenes were not too scary or gory for me. To see details about the violence and scary scenes, you can check out the book on the Screen It First website! https://screenitfirst.com/book/the-phantom-of-the-opera-1370838