So I'm pretty sure everyone who reads this book has heard of the musical, or even the old movie. Let me tell you now it is nothing like that. The Phantom isn't a handsome, disturbed man this lives like a hermit with one side of his face a bit creepy, he is horrid. A walking skeleton, a corpse, a disease, and he actually had been travelling and lived in a few different countries and has a name: Erik.
Likewise for the other characters. Christine isn't a dits, unwittingly following a mass murdering man who she thinks is her father's ghosts, she becomes well aware he is just a man soon. Raoul... well, I didn't like him in the movie and I hoped the book would shed some good, heroic light on him and, well... I liked him even less.
The story itself took me deeper than the musical, showing more action, more deaths and love then in the movie. Their were characters that are so important that are never even mentioned in the movie, and a wonderful plot line that drags you along with it. I love how he wrote it as if it were real evidence, and a true story. It was so believable that I believed he could have existed. ON top of it all the Phantom, no matter how disgusting and horrible he was, I still had pity on him and cried for him.
Over-all it was a wonderful book, and I encourage any Phantom lovers such as myself out there to read it.