“Shadows of the Opera: The Mark of the Revenant” is a great collection of interconnected short stories by Rick Lai.
These are “Wold Newton” stories that make use of characters (and hints) from the Phantom of the Opera, the Black Coats (a criminal element from an interesting series of novels written in France in the 1800s and republished by Black Coat Press), The Shadow and others.
“Wold Newton” is a reference to a concept put forth by Philip Jose Farmer that tries to link together various fictitional characters into a consistent universe (and way oversimplifying it). Some don’t care for the concept. All the characters and hints can be confusing to many not familiar with the original stories (which includes me to a degree), and this can be off putting to some (instead of leading them to read the originals, which is what usually happens in my case).
As Rick has been writing several similar stories in Black Coat Press’s “Tales of the Shadowmen” anthology, I figured this volume may be just a reprint of those stories. Instead they are all new stories, and in fact this is the first of a trio of volumes. I look forward to the following volumes. The next one is out, along with a “side sequel.”
The basic setup is this. In the original “Phantom of the Opera” novel, there is a little-seen, but very mysterious character who also haunted the Opera (no, that’s not made up, the character does exist, and in fact they quote from the novel the few passages that mention this character). So Rick’s idea is that this character is actually an ancestor of The Shadow, who is trained by the Phantom and takes on the name of The Revenant.
This character sets up a network of other agents to fight the Black Coats and other villainous characters such as Countess Cagliostro (from the Arsene Lupin stories and others). Also tied in is another proto-Shadow character, the silent film character Judex (see my previous postings on this character), in the form of a character who is Judex’s mother (who is one of The Revenent’s agents, thus explaining how Judex learned his skills: from his mother).
As noted, this is not a novel, but a collection of seven short stories that proceed in chronological order. The first few setup the main characters. One deals with what really happened in the “Phantom of the Opera.” Another one is Lovecraftian, with tie-ins to “The Yellow Sign.” We see in these stories were the Revenant fights against the Black Coats, and also builds up a small network of assistants known as the Acolytes of the Shadows. One of the most important of these is the Jade Seraph. All the stories I found enjoyable.
Also included is an afterwards that explains the origin of the various characters.
If there is any criticism, it’s in the proofreading. I found several problems of messed up punctuation, and a few cases of incorrect wording. The book was published by Wild Cat Books, but don’t know if it will be reprinted by Black Coat Press.
The followup books (Shadows of the Opera: Retribution in Blood and “side sequel” Sisters of The Shadows: The Curse of Cagliostro) are out from Black Coat Press. At least one more book is planned in this series, and I believe one more is planned for the “side sequel” series. I will be doing review of those works soon.
