ŷ������

"The music brightens our synchronized footsteps, as warm and honey yellow as the sun, flooding our surroundings, relaxing me until there's no strain anywhere on my body. Though the aria rages from my throat--the mood dark, mad and melancholy--I'm unaffected. Bubbles of serenity encapsulate every I staccato, trill and glissando, then lift them from my vocal cords and roll them off my lips, effortlessly."

"His lips part and our tongues meet, lighting up my insides with voltaic pulses of emotions, auras that burst in my mind on explosions of color flavored with caramel, midnight flowers and singed spices—dark, tempestuous, and succulent."

"An expression of sympathy and supplication deepens his brows his brown, hawkish eyes before they fluctuate to that shimmery, coppery gaze I saw in the garden upon my arrival."

"Rune's light. The purest white he'd ever seen... incarnate, rare... the essence of an angel."

"Logic tells me I should be afraid. But I can't stop thinking about all the hours I've spent with my maestro, how I no longer fear what he hides beneath his mask. How I've seen his soul written upon the pages of his past and it's beautiful."

Rune, Etalon, Erik, and the late Christine are/were all incubi/succubi. In the original mythology, an incubus (male) or succubus (female) was a demon that sexually assaulted sleeping humans, causing sexual dreams in the sleeper.

C.S. Lewis includes incubi among the many types of monster in Jadis�� army in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, although he gives no description of them specifically, merely saying of all the demonic rabble gathered that “if I did [describe them] the grown-ups would probably not let you read this book.�� I wonder how he’d react to this book, with the Twitter handle @abramskids printed on the back cover.



In Howard’s invented lore, however, incubi and succubi are not demons, but psychic vampires. I am not making this up. The book actually calls them psychic vampires on several occasions. They feed off of human emotion—not just arousal and lust, but anger and fear and sorrow and even hope. If the human gets too excited and the psychic vampire too greedy, the human will probably die.

So a great deal of the book is Rune and Etalon angsting over the people they’ve drained in the past, and whom they may accidentally drain in the future if they’re not careful. As for Erik, he runs an underground rave club at a secret location where he gets the crowd pumped every Saturday night, then locks them in and feeds off of their party highness (and fear, if any of them know or suspect that something’s wrong). That’s how he’s lasted this long.

Rune describes the time that she discovered that her powers could affect other people. She was at a college party, where she was too young to be because there was alcohol and she’s sixteen. Anyway, she got all wound up because one of the frat boys was playing an opera on his vinyl record player, because we all know how cultured the average frat boy is. High as a kite and singing like a madwoman, Rune hopped into the pool and started making out like crazy with the nearest guy, whom she had never seen before. He had carried her to a bedroom of the frat house and they were about to have sex when her singing first started to drain his heightened energies. Before he could do anything more than kiss her, he was comatose. He’s still comatose, hooked to wires in the hospital.

Our “heroine�� claims to feel very guilty about this incident, but while at Erik’s club she passionately kisses her friend Jackson from school. Again, supposedly she feels terrible about what she did to the college boy, and Jackson already has a girlfriend. But none of that stops Rune from kissing the poor, bewildered Jackson until he passes out, and sucking his life-force into her own. She’s such a great role model. /sarc

Rune and Etalon also make out a lot, but at least they can’t hurt each other because psychic vampires can’t drain each other’s energies, or something convenient like that.

In flashbacks, we learn that Etalon’s mom sold herself to a brutal pimp in order to keep her child from starving, and eventually that man killed her. Apparently the pimp was running a massive underground operation of enslaved women and children. After his mom’s death, Etalon was taken by the man’s brutes and kept captive in the catacombs below Paris. The homelier children were sold for cheap labor, while the pretty ones were sold into sex slavery. Etalon wasn’t just pretty, but he had a beautiful voice and his singing reduced the guards to tears, so they poured lye down his throat to ruin his vocal cords. He was about eight years old when all this went down. Eventually Erik heard of this angel-voiced kid and bought his freedom, but before he rescued Etalon we have to suffer through a very creepy conversation where the pimp, assuming Erik wanted the kid for pedophilic purposes, described how easy it would be to “train�� Etalon. *shudders*

In this story, Christine returned to Erik after her husband (whose name is never given in this version) died. Somehow, we are told, these two were two halves of the same soul, which got split upon being reincarnated, in addition to being Psychic Vampires ��. They became lovers and had a baby together, but the child was stillborn. Erik pretended to bury the daughter, but really kept her in an underground lab that Christine didn’t know about, preserving the little corpse while he figured out how to bring her back to life. When Christine discovered this, she became furious and left him for good.

Christine is dead now, and no, the book does not explain why some Psychic Vampires �� live normal human life spans and die while other Psychic Vampires �� live for centuries. Her soul, apparently, was split yet again upon reincarnation, and one half was incarnate in Etalon and the other was incarnate in Rune. Erik thinks that if he surgically removes Rune’s vocal cords—or cuts her throat, it’s really not clear—and he may or may not need to kill Etalon too, the whole thing was so poorly-explained—he can revive his daughter.

Wouldn’t it have made more sense to go looking for the �岹�ܲ���ٱ��’s soul? Never mind.

This is where I had to put the book down.

Rune: Grandma always said that my cursed gypsy blood caused all this trouble.
Rune’s Mom: We’ve had this discussion before, Rune! Your grandmother is a homicidal version of Archie Bunker. Don’t pay any mind to her bigoted nonsense. Of course your dad’s Romani ancestors didn’t curse you. Nor did your Irish ancestors from my side of the family give you the ability to talk to leprechauns. The end.

I may very well be a minority when it comes to my thoughts on this book. It's not all bad I promise, so let's get too it.

I think Howard is a great writer, I think she really knows how to twist and turn a story to completely make it her own and a story that is unique.

The main character is not the phantom, it's Rune who is very much the Christine we want her to be or are familiar with when it comes to the musical. She is musically inclined with curly hair! HA! However she has an ability that has almost become a curse. Once she hears music she must sing otherwise she literally becomes physically ill. She has no idea where this gift/curse came from or why she has it. So after a tragedy hits someone in Runes life she is transferred to a musical private school. As a character I had a hard time connecting with her, there wasn't really anything wrong with her I just couldn't connect.

There were also many other side characters that are involved that��help make this retelling completely the author's own which was fun.