April's roundup is overflowing with new things!
Andrew Lloyd Webber's The Phantom of the Opera: A Behind-the-Mask Look at the Global Phenomenon from LW Entertainment is a nonfiction offering tracing the history of the Lloyd Webber show and looking at its modern fanbases and performances around the world. It'll be interesting to see if it adds anything to previous similar works such as the Perry book!
Our Strange Duet by Erin A. Craig is a romance-focused version that claims to be Christine's own perspective; given that it mentions the Opera Populaire and seems to be largely geared toward whether or not Christine is going to choose to embark on romance with the Phantom or with Raoul, it looks like it's primarily based on the Lloyd Webber musical.
Das Phantom der Oper by Anderson Cabral is a German-language retelling of the original story, and claims to be far more psychological horror-focused than even the original novel, so one for the horror buffs, maybe!
The Phantom: The Untold Story of the Phantom of the Opera by Meg Danielle Kircher is doing something we haven't seen in a while - the Phantom is in fact actually secretly Philippe de Chagny, Raoul's older brother, and his "death" in the original novel was just a fakeout so that no one discovered his true identity. The story centers around a historian who slowly begins to uncover this and other secrets of the Phantom's life a hundred years later.
The Phantom of the Opera by Edward French is a dramatic audio performance of the story by Edward E. French, a famous makeup artist known for Star Trek and Terminator movies. We seldom get audio entries, so this is an exciting one!
The Phantom of the Opera Little Golden Book is an adaptation of the Lloyd Webber musical for children, in the classic Little Golden Book format that has been a children's staple for the last 80 or so years.
Phantom: A Winter Stalker Romance by K.M. Nixon is a dark romance - man rents cottage to woman, finds woman irresistible, starts watching her through the walls, as you do. There doesn't seem to be much musical element - she's a writer, not a singer - but it seems to be an intentional riff on the story. Also, Christmas!
The Phantom's Opus: A Witness Cycle Story by Pedro A. Romero is an interesting one; the Witness Cycle series appears to be a fantasy post-apocalyptic setting, where most of human civilization has crumbled and various classic monsters are responding to and observing the end of humanity as they know it. Previous installments in the series included ones starring Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, the Mummy, and the Wolf-Man, and this one sees the Phantom trying to archive and preserve all of humanity's musical history before it's lost forever, hoping to turn it into something that the natural world can play instead.
Finally, this month's questionable entry:
Phantom of the Opera: A Modern English Adaptation by Kay Rowan is another of those "modern adaptations" that appears to just be the de Mattos translation but with more modern vernacular and vocabulary, stripping much of the original atmosphere and design but making it easier to read for those who don't want to look things up as they go. There's no way to know if this is AI generated, but it's the kind of work to be wary of, since it's very easy to feed the public domain original text into a LLM and ask it to "rewrite" in modern language. If it isn't AI, it's still notably much shorter than the original - only 90 pages - so this may read more like a summary than an actual retelling/adaptation.
That's it for April - what a lovely spring!
