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Excellent, marvelous. A phantasmagorical (ha ha!) PERFECTION. NO JOKE. This is one true House of Horrors, perhaps the best one ever orchestrated (maybe discounting Poe). Yes, EVER. The prose is so simple, so readable, that the barest of essentials are there, in all their power & glory: the haunted house, the victim-lover, the victimizer/lover, the clandestine meetings, the haunted past, the switch-over of protagonists, the uncertainty caused by one elegant overflow of optical illusions, the Victorian conventions all intended to spook the hell out of a reader that's totally in awe of the way a classic story can be so expertly conveyed. Both this & "Dracula" are revolutionary in that uberentertaining way in which the plot is given to us: through letters & witness accounts. Yes, the only way to be frightened is to have the monster in the backdrop, a perpetual threat that's under the velvet curtain. It is truly, TRULY (I want to scream out my window!) delicious-- how nobody from the Paris Opera knows exactly what the phantom looks like, how they all put up their own fears projected unto the myth (who, I must admit, is a true turn-of-the-century bad-ass-- a Micheal Myers combined with Hannibal Lecter... you must meet this version-- he's a more maniacal and romantic phantom than the musicals!). I could not ask for more in a book, its brevity is bittersweet (you wish there were more details, more certainties... this effect, of course, is genius); its use of freak show conventions are all aligned beautifully. This is a masterpiece to be savored! (Read it to your cool kid or niece/nephew!)

UPDATE: just caught the show this last Wednesday night (9/7/16) at the Buell. No musical is as technically rich as this one (which is SO like the Phantom himself). It IS the decade of the 80s-its very opulent (quint)essence! And this is the decade of my birth...

UPDATE: Second time, with the first black Phantom on tour at the Buell! (11/6/19)