"The Final Threshold" by K. Marie Ramsland, 1989

From Phantoms, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Rosalind M. Greenberg, 1989

Grade: C+

Ah, another short story.  It feels like we've been in short story land forever, doesn't it?  Hold onto your hats: there are still seven more left.  I pray that some of them will transcend the mediocrity that plagues this poor anthology like a case of the shingles.

Incidentally, I noticed when reading this that I appear to be instantly biased against anything that doesn't use the original Leroux novel as its source material.  This little story is mainly Webber-based, and even though I love Webber's version more than little cinnamon dumplings, it rubs me the wrong way to see someone base a derivative off a derivative.  That's just personal bitchiness, I presume; I mean, the whole point of this project is looking at iteration after derivation after revision of the same story by a bunch of different people.  I suppose what I want is for an author to give it enough of a "differentness" to make it stand out--I want the author to give the characters enough life and interest that I don't just yawn all the way through and point out all the trappings of whatever version spawned it.

Anyway, on with the show.  As I said, clues that this is mostly Webber-based abound, from the title (a line from "The Point of No Return" in the Webber musical) onward through the use of Meg Giry as a major character (in fact, the main character), the presence of the wax doll and discarded mask from the end of the musical, Madame Giry's extremely advanced knowledge of the Phantom's shenanigans, the playing of the "forbidden" Don Juan, the mention of the Webber-created tenor Piangi, and even to repeating lines from the musical near-verbatim.  There are trappings of the Leroux novel here that suggest that Ramsland read it--it is emphasized that Christine is blonde and that Meg is "swarthy", and reference is made to the Phantom's promise to Madame Giry that Meg will be an "empress"--but they seem tacked on; ir's fairly obvious that this particular author encountered the Webber musical first, and later went back to the original source material for a few details.

Meg is the main character here, as noted above, and she's rather normal.  In fact, depressingly so; not normal as in quirky, interesting and realistic, but normal as in tissue-thin and poorly characterized.  She's spunky--but only sort of!  She's strong--but only sometimes!  She has a desperate ambition--except when she gives it up!  She's just like you--except you really hope not!  Seriously, it's not that she's bad or anything... she's just not good.  She's a cookie-cutter gingerbread girl with no real personality, and as such she got boring really, really fast.

Anyway, Meg wants to be famous, and she thinks Christine is a spineless, lily-livered little twit who wasted what was obviously a golden opportunity to be the Phantom's protege.  Her dislike of Christine is just as flat as the rest of her character, as it's largely invented to give her a plausible reason to attempt to contact the Phantom.  Nevertheless, there are some poignant comparisons to be made between Meg, who cries that she doesn't want to be just a faceless chorus girl anymore (apt, as Meg's character as originally written really is largely faceless, and of course the statement also unwittingly calls up the Phantom's disfigurement) and Christine, who is presented as not just vacuous but also haunted and possibly a little bit mad (suggesting that the ultimate price of true art may indeed be madness).  Interestingly, Meg wants to petition the Phantom to coach her in dance, rather than in song; it is an obvious tell for the reader, making it clear that she views the Phantom as a supernatural muse, able to inspire any talent, rather than some mortal teacher who might have aided Christine.  Interestingly enough, this is in direct opposition to her mother, who as we see in flashbacks and asides views the Phantom as a mortal man (which, of course, is diametrically opposed to the original Giry's assurance that he was a supernatural force for good--another obvious influence from the Webber musical).

When Meg descends into the Phantom's lair (through a series of coincidences and half-remembered hints that are perfectly ridiculous, but that hasn't stopped any author yet) to appeal to him, she finds the wax figurine of Christine and mistakes it for a corpse.  Having previously displayed animosity toward the singer, she descends to a confusing and immediate level of great distress over the "death" of her friend.  Then, of course, once she realizes that Christine isn't dead, she goes right back to despising her for her weakness.  It was supposed to make us connect with the character's human foibles, but instead was confusing and boring.  What was interesting was the fact that the face of the wax doll had been disfigured by someone; intriguingly, Meg assumes that Christine herself did it, though I can't imagine why she would jump to that conclusion, particularly since she knows that Christine refused the Phantom (well, I do... she would jump to that conclusion so the author could be all OMG FORESHADOWING, but we frown on that here).  It would seem more logical for the Phantom to have done so in a fit of rage, I'd think.  But who cares what I think?

She finds the Phantom doing his cliched playing at the organ thing, yadda yadda, insert fluffy filler text about her girlish heart and its fluttering here.  However, it's here at the very end of the story that things finally get interesting, when Ramsland blessedly decides to take things in a different direction.  Rather than wallowing in Phantom angst or, worse, wallowing in newfound sentiment (I was terrified it was going to be all "But now Meg is here, and lo, my shriveled heart beats again, and lo! I will love her and pet her and make her my protege, and lo! Christine sucks!"), Ramsland takes a sharp right turn detour from the Boulevard of Overused Ideas and guns it straight down the Horrorific Highway.  Little details begin to be scary, which is surprising for a reader who's been coasting along in the warm happy romantic world of Webber's Phantom for the story up until this point.  The Phantom has long, claw-like yellow fingernails.  He has bony, scary limbs.  And rather than just making me say, "Look, Ramsland's throwing in some details again in case people still doubt she read the book which she TOTALLY DID OKAY," which I said a lot in this story, they become organic parts of the narrative itself.  The fingernails seemed out of place and frightening, a sudden intrusion into the candy-coated world we'd been inhabiting so far.  I was scared, myself.

As an aside, things are a bit confusing until we decide (in my case, after finishing... which tells me that pacing is not all it could be here) to throw logic to the wind and embrace the idea that the Phantom really is a supernatural agent rather than a real man.  Several things he does--causing the mask to burst into flames in Meg's hands, conjuring what may or may not be an illusion of Christine--seem to have no particularly possible or logical explanations as to what he could have come up with on the fly.  Then again, if he is supernatural, why does he need things like trick doors?  It is a mystery.  I like ambiguity in the character of the Phantom, really I do--but confusion and lack of clarity are not the same thing as tantalizing enigma.

The true horror is, of course, the final realization of what exactly has happened to Christine; her face has been skinned, leaving her hideously disfigured for life.  The implication that the Phantom performed the skinning himself with those hideous fingernails is quite literally chilling.  It is a final, complete revenge on the woman who scorned not only him but the only beauty and redemption he had to offer the world, his music: she is now exactly the same as the Phantom, a prodigiously beautiful musical talent doomed to anonymity, never to be able to share her song with the world.  Another side to the horror coin is the psychological assertion that all art has a terrible price, and that attaining one's desire has disastrous results.

Meg is really just a foil for Ramsland to show us what happened to Christine (which, incidentally, may not be face-skinning obscurity--it's possible that's some kind of illusion, rather than reality, but who the hell can tell?); she's not necessary in and of herself and doesn't get much in the way of growth or realization.  In fact, in the long tradition of horror heroines, we don't even find out what happens to her after The Shocking Revelation; it's up to us to imagine whether the Phantom kills her or sends her home a basket case.  It doesn't matter.  Even in the story in which she has the spotlight... who cares about Meg?  Apparently, not Ramsland, or us.

What Ramsland has done here would be referred to by many dreamy fans of the Webber musical as a nasty, dirty, low-down no-good trick: the story has been set up as a fluffy piece of feel-good fanfiction, and then at the last minute suddenly metamorphosed into horror and hideousness.  The story effectively puts us into Meg's shoes; when the comforting world of her expectations and illusions is ripped away, it is ripped away from us as well.  The wool is pulled over our eyes without us ever knowing it, so that we are as shocked and appalled as Meg is by the final moment.  Ramsland manages to make her audience as naive as her heroine for a few short pages before brutally punting them back out into reality.  For this reason, the story makes a startling leap up to C+, away from the dreaded land of the Ds (it doesn't get any higher because I really think this could have been done a lot better, but the attempt at least merits recognition).

The horror, as I said, is very effective, but there is of course absolutely no whimper of redemption or the struggle between good and evil left in this little story.  It's all evil, which triumphs and then lives in its squalor.  There's a place for that, and in a lot of stories I love it, but here?  Ramsland paints a very effective picture, but misses the point of the original novel entirely.

There's no pleasing me in this bitchy mood.  On to slaughter the next short.

 Create your own free wiki!Support CommunityPublic, not yet premium Privacy Policy RSS