The Phantom of the Opera

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Puffin, 1994 - Juvenile Fiction - 322 pages

The thrilling story of the 'Opera Ghost', legendary for making performers at the Paris Opera House apprehensive when they sit in their dressing-rooms or walk alone in the building's corridors. But it isn't until the triumphant performance the sensual Christine and her startling disappearance that a sense of dread begins to pervade. In an ever increasing pattern of fear and violence, the phantom of the opera begins to strike, but always with the beautiful young singer at the centre of his macabre desires. Filled with the colour and theatrical spectacle of the Paris Opera House and the fascination of love transformed into murderous obsession, this classic work of suspense remains a rivetting journey into the dark regions of the human heart.

Abridged for Puffin Classics.

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Contents

Prologue
1
Is It the Ghost?
7
The New Margarita
19
Copyright

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About the author (1994)

Gaston Leroux, born in Paris in 1868, was a French journalist, playwright, and detective/thriller writer. Beginning his career as a crime reporter and war correspondent, he lived an adventurous life that took him to Scandinavia, Eastern Europe, and even into North Africa disguised as an Arab. His high-spirited, often dangerous, escapades and questioning nature provided much of the background and plot material for his sensational mystery and adventure stories, particularly those starring his reporter-sleuth, Joseph Rouletabille. One of his most famous detective novels, The Mystery of the Yellow Room, was published in 1907, and his works have been called "among the finest examples of the detective stories we possess." But Leroux's best-known story is The Phantom of the Oper a (1911), whose macabre hero has been played in film by classic horror film stars Lon Chaney and Claude Rains. Leroux died in Nice in 1927.

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