Bah.

"The Phantom of the Soap Opera" by Henry Slesar, 1989

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

Grade: D

Where to even begin?  If the last story was lackluster and ultimately disappointing, this one is like ordering braised lamb and being served hot dogs and tater tots.  The last story was a blind date with a weak chin and an annoying tendency to snort when he laughs; this one is wearing a checkered suit, has a license plate that reads "H0RNY", and stares at you blankly whenever you use words of over two syllables.

All right, so I'm a nasty person, and a nastier reviewer.  I can't help myself.  It's not like this story tried to feel me up or insulted my mother or something, to stretch the metaphor entirely too far; it's just that there were so few redeeming characteristics in the story that it was a chore to finish reading it.  I was BORED.  I didn't care in the slightest what was going to happen to these people, none of whom I could even tell you the name of (actually, someone was named Lois, but I only noticed because I have a close friend with that name).  It was a major snoozefest.

I sort of wish it had been offensively bad, because then I could at least have spent some time cheerfully lambasting it and then felt like I had accomplished something.  But no, all I feel is that that half hour of my life that was inadvisedly spent reading it will never return.  I suppose you people want some kind of plot summary or explanation of why it bored me to tears or something... you demanding hussies.

Basically, it's a transplant of the Phantom story to modern... L.A., I think, where instead of an opera house he haunts the taping studio of a popular soap opera.  Those are pretty much the only real parallels.  The narrator makes a point of comparing himself to Gaston Leroux in the very first paragraph, but Leroux's cherished themes of love and redemption, societal strata and alienations, are completely absent from the story.  He also notes that he was born the same day that Gaston Leroux died, though he immediately attempts to tell us that there is no connection between the two events (but unconvincingly, since you already mentioned it, didn't you, jackass?).  This short introduction attempts to both remind us of Leroux's story and make it clear that this version is much more rational, entirely different, and modernly superior.  No one is convinced.

Not a single theme of the original story survives.  The "Christine" character is vapid, self-centered, and cowardly, and certainly has no emotional impact on the Phantom character; the idea of social rejection has been replaced by that of being fired from an acting gig (and, honey, those are not in the same ballpark no matter what Hollywood wants you to think), absolutely no effort is made to address the Phantom's madness as anything other than his entire baseline personality; the attempted comment on today's society viewing age as more to be vilified than ugliness is clumsy at best and almost completely ineffective, so much so that I barely noticed it; as a result of having no personality other than being mildly insane, the Phantom has no positive characteristics beyond his knowledge of stagecraft, and thus hasn't even the slightest possibility at redemption; the narrator, who fulfills the Raoul role, has no emotional stake in anything and is just another tired cardboard horror hero poking around in the dark and then running away when it pokes back.  More damning yet, there are no new themes set in place to replace those; the story is themeless, unless it's a very small undercurrent of approbation for resourcefulness.  The entire mess has just been boiled down to a garden-variety mystery story--a rather boring one at that, whose mystery is solved halfway through and whose climax was so yawntastic I'm having trouble remembering exactly how it went.

The real tragedy is that it's apparent this man must have actually read Leroux, from the number of cute little references and asides he puts in pertaining to the original work.  He makes several references to the Phantom's "dark kingdom" or "underground kingdom", and Nina, the "Christine" character, insists upon calling him a revenant instead of a ghost, a nod to the French word revenant which is so often used in the original text to refer to the Phantom.

Disappointment just heaped on top of disappointment until I was sad and wanted to go watch television or something else that would stimulate my brain a little more.  Music wafting up out of the underground turns out to be from a radio, which is incredibly disappointing as it adds nothing to the Phantom's image; it's sort of like a dangled carrot that is taken away at the last moment.  The Phantom himself is an ex-soap-actor who was fired because after 20 years he was too old to convincingly play his role, and who has gone insane and now believes himself to actually be the role he played; far from Leroux's Phantom with his multi-faceted, tortured insanity, this guy is a textbook victim of delusional disorder, an old nut with no real reason for his condition beyond having been professionally thwarted in one instance.  He is likewise no longer a sovereign directing affairs in his unique realm or an entitled lurker whose wishes must be followed, but a disgruntled ex-employee who hurls cake at the cast and spends most of his time hiding in an old recording room, watching tapes of his run in the show.  It is, to say the least, disillusioning.  If there had been a point to the disillusionment, a larger metaphor--say, the deterioration of society as it ages, or the constant shrinking of the world that renders mysteries and the supernatural almost obsolete--it would have been interesting.  Unfortunately, there was no point.

In the end, the Phantom is triumphant--he eludes capture and continues to live in the bowels of the studio, doing his crazy thing--but it doesn't really matter.  He achieves no redemption (he would need an actual personality for that), had no real greivance to start with (or at least, certainly not one that warranted his behavior), and is generally redundant.  He is a petty little Phantom, by no means a tragic figure or even a convincing monster, and we as readers are totally bummed out.

Seriously.  The Phantom kills a dude by nailing a chair to the floor so that he has a coronary when he overexerts himself trying to lift it.  That really is my feeling on this entire story.  Death by incredibly unspectacular means.

Also, the author misspelt "impresario".  For which, in light of his other transgressions, he will not be forgiven.

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