Before You Begin

Before you begin.

Somewhere beneath the vast Paris Opera, past the cellars and across a black underground lake, there lives a man in a mask. The ballet-girls whisper of him; the managers dread the letters he leaves in Box Five; and a young soprano, Christine Daaé, believes the voice that teaches her to sing is the Angel of Music her dead father promised to send. When Christine’s childhood sweetheart, the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, hears that voice for himself, the three of them are drawn into a struggle of love and jealousy that will end far below the stage, in the house that Erik built where no daylight ever comes.

Gaston Leroux’s 1910 romance is a Gothic thriller dressed in gaslight and crimson velvet — a chandelier that falls, a masked ball where Death walks the grand staircase, a face that must not be seen. Yet at its heart is something stranger and sadder than any ghost story: the loneliest of monsters, a genius no one could love, asking only to be looked upon without horror.

It is a story to be enjoyed first for its spectacle and suspense — the abduction in mid-performance, the descent into the cellars, the terrible choice of the scorpion or the grasshopper — and remembered ever after for its pity.

This illustrated edition opens with a gallery of the cast, a map of the great opera house from its roof to its lake, and its most famous scenes; and as you read, the story unfolds in six visual movements — recap plates you unlock along the way, each gathering together the tale so far, with never a glimpse of what lies ahead. Turn the page, and the curtain rises.