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Susan Kay's Phantom
Author: Susan Kay
No. of Pages: various; 500 - 600 pgs
Original Publish Year: 1991"The little black book began to live on my bedside table and I returned again and again to those passages which intrigued and puzzled me. Increasingly I found my attention drawn to the final three pages, to the brief historical outline in which Leroux accounts for the Phantom's earlier existence. The main bulk of his novel - including all screen and stage versions - had dealt only with the last six months or so in the life of a man who must have been around fifty. I began to feel that the tale we had once come to know as The Phantom of the Opera was perhaps only the magnificent tip of the iceberg, and that somewhere beneath a huge, human story lay waiting to be told - the story of a man who was driven to many terrible vices and yet still retained, in Leroux's own words, "a heart that could have held the empire of the world." The eventful and exciting past at which Leroux had hinted mustsurely have been filled with a number of significant relationships... perhaps even an earlier love affair. This was the story I wanted to read, and eventually I began to understand that it was also the story I wanted to write."
- Susan Kay: Author's Note
Story Plot (updated) | Quotes (updated) | Ordering Info