Unlocking the Dark Secrets of Christine Daaé: Erin A. Craig’s Gritty New Twist on ‘Phantom of the Opera’ That Will Crush Your Expectations!
Ever wondered what Christine Daaé might be thinking beneath that iconic mask in The Phantom of the Opera? Well, Erin A. Craig is here to lift the veil with her electrifying new novel, Our Strange Duet—a title that perfectly captures the haunting and tender bond between Christine and the Phantom. Arriving a whopping 40 years after Andrew Lloyd Webber’s legendary musical first graced the stage, this book doesn’t just retell the story; it dives deep inside Christine’s head, exploring the untold ambitions, whispers, and dreams that the stage musical barely had time to hint at. As someone who’s navigated both the world of theatrical chaos and the quiet discipline of writing, Erin brings a uniquely personal touch to this retelling. So, if you’ve ever sat mesmerized by the music and wondered what Christine’s really feeling amidst all the drama, get ready for a duet like no other—one that resonates with old fans and new alike, blending nostalgia with fresh insight. Ready to see the Phantom through a new lens and find out what really makes Christine tick? The stage is set, and the overture has begun. LEARN MORE
Our Strange Duet. It’s a phrase that perfectly encapsulates the relationship between Christine Daae and the Phantom of the Opera, and it’s also the title of Erin A. Craig’s new novel which is arriving 40 years after Andrew Lloyd Webber’s legendary musical first took to the stage.
Being published on September 1, Our Strange Duet, created in collaboration with Lloyd Webber Entertainment, retells and expands upon the events of the musical entirely from Christine’s point of view. Rather than attempting to reinvent a story audiences have loved for four decades, Craig steps into the spaces the stage musical doesn’t have time to explore, examining Christine’s thoughts, ambitions, desires and relationships while filling in pieces of her life that have existed largely offstage.
It’s also an unusually personal assignment for Craig, author of House of Salt and Sorrows, Small Favors and The Thirteenth Child.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “It has been just the wildest fever dream. The project came together super fast. Phantom of the Opera has been near and dear to my heart since I was in eighth grade when I first heard the overture. I was a super sporty basketball girl at the time when I heard it, we were in band class, I played the trumpet very badly, but we listened to the overture and I was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to know more about this.’”
“And so I read the Leroux novel. I convinced my parents to take me to Toronto to go see the show. We’re in Michigan, so New York was a little too far of a drive, but we could do Toronto. I remember sitting in the Pantages Theatre and being, like, ‘I want to do this every day for the rest of my life. I don’t know how to do it. I’m not an actor. I’m not a performer at all.’ But I ended up becoming a stage manager, and while I never got a call for Phantom of the Opera, the show itself, but it has always just been the show that gave me my first act.”
From the stage to the page
She would spend approximately 15 years working around the country as a freelance stage manager, but parenthood sent her on the path to a second, unexpected career.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “I worked with musicals and the Rockettes and opera companies until I had my daughter. But then we realized tech week schedules and sopranos singing and newborns don’t really work well together, so I took some time away. I’ve always loved writing—I never thought I would do it professionally or for publication or anything; it was always just a fun fan-fiction kind of thing. While she was little, I was, like, ‘What if I tried to write a book and get it published? And that could be my thing.’ So I went through the query process and wrote my first couple of books. Coming back now with Our Strange Duet, it was just this beautiful full-circle moment. The theater life kind of diverged and writing took over, but then this just brought everything back together.”
“It was kind of like a rediscovery itself all these years later of, ‘Oh my gosh, I love this soundtrack. Why haven’t I listened to it in a couple years?’ And getting back into going to see live theater again. For a long time with COVID and everything, I didn’t and I had ‘Tiny Craig’ at home. And so we are now getting to introduce her into musical theater and see her love of that grow. It has just been such a joy from start to finish. I’m so grateful Andrew Lloyd Webber has changed my life twice now.”
The phantasmic journey
The road to Our Strange Duet began when Lloyd Webber Entertainment started thinking about the musical’s 40th anniversary and how Phantom could be introduced to another generation. The answer would include a publishing partnership with Penguin Random House, with Our Strange Duet serving as the centerpiece of a larger collection of books. Craig, however, knew none of that when a seemingly innocent text arrived from her editor.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “It’s such a fun story. The CEO, James McKnight, knew the 40th anniversary is this year in October, so he was thinking, ‘What do we do to welcome in the next generation of fans to the family?’ So he met with some people at Penguin Random House and said, ‘We want to commission a series of books.’ Our Strange Duet is kind of the flag, the tent pole for everything, but there’s also a Little Golden Books and a gorgeous coffee-table edition that’s coming out.”
“They said, ‘We want to bring in a big author for this YA retelling of Phantom. What are some good names?’ And they started pitching around some ideas. My editor was on the call and she said, ‘We’ve got this author who’s known for gothic atmospheric retellings. I think she was a stage manager. I don’t know if she ever did Phantom, but we can see.’ And so there I am, just going about my life in Michigan, and I got this random text from my editor just saying, ‘Do you like Phantom of the Opera?’ And I was, like, ‘Aha!’ and just word-vomited at her for several texts. All she said was, ‘Okay, cool.’”
Craig eventually learned that the project existed, but was warned that intellectual-property work involved a lengthy selection process and that she shouldn’t get overly excited. Then came a suspiciously timed Zoom call just before Christmas break.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “She said, ‘Oh, your adult debut is coming out next year. We should talk about marketing plans.’ And I was, like, ‘Should we?’ It was odd. We were in the middle of just catching up and everything, and all of a sudden her screen went black. She said, ‘Oh no, can you see me? I can’t see you. I’m blank for some reason.’ And then a few minutes later it clicks on and she had changed her background to the Phantom of the Opera logo, and she had the overture start playing. It was just the most wonderfully over-the-top theatrical presentation— just happy tears on both sides of the camera.”
Meeting Andrew Lloyd Webber
If being chosen for the book was surreal, Craig’s meetings with the man whose music had changed her life at 13 pushed the experience considerably further.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “It was wild. I actually met with Andrew a couple times as we were fleshing out ideas for the book and I was running some stuff past him. This is wildly cinematic, but I remember meeting him. We were in his apartment, the window was backlit and it was just like all of the rays of heaven had opened up as he comes forward. It’s, like, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber. You’re right in front of me. How is this real life?’”
“He’s been such a wonderful person to bounce ideas off of. I talked him through all of my ideas for the book, the skeleton of everything and where we wanted to not divert away from the musical, but just expand upon what he has in the show. With stage logistics and everything, there’s only so much you can do for two-and-a-half hours given the audience’s attention span.”
That ability to expand became one of the keys to Our Strange Duet. Craig could explore moments the musical merely suggests—and even periods of time that disappear between scenes and acts.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “Because it is exclusively through Christine Daaé’s perspective, we’re getting to see these moments that we don’t get to see onstage, where she hears the Angel of Music’s voice for the first time. What happens between the chandelier crashing and the start of Act Two? Those six months, what’s going on then? Getting to flesh out these ideas with him, it was just so lovely and it was such a great collaborative, creative discussion. It made me remember all of the production stage meetings I would do when I was a stage manager, where we sat down with the set designers and costume designers and talked through everything.”
Finally hearing Christine’s side
At the heart of Craig’s approach is the idea that Christine doesn’t need to be reinvented, but actually heard. For all her importance to The Phantom of the Opera, she frequently finds herself caught between characters with their own needs and agendas, but moving the perspective inside her head changes that equation considerably.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “Christine is so central to the heart of Phantom of the Opera, the reason all of this is happening, but in the musical itself, a lot of it feels kind of like it’s happening around her. The Phantom’s got his agenda, Raoul’s got his thing, the theater managers even, and Carlotta and Piangi—all of the characters have something they want from her. And it’s kind of just happening in this chaotic world-storm around her, so getting to see and center her story and just live out that plot line through her head, we get to see all of her emotional dilemmas.”
“Especially in the final confrontation in Act Two, where we see her make her choice. We hear all the beautiful music and see how torn she is, but to actually be in her head and hearing all the inner thoughts and the dialogue and the, ‘Gosh, I want to do this, but I want to do that. What guy do I end up with? Should I go off and leave them both?’ All of these things—it’s a new way to really see the plot evolve through her perspective.”
She also rejects the notion that a Christine written four decades later needed to be fundamentally altered to conform to modern ideas about female characters.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “I don’t think, honestly, that at heart she has changed much. The way we’re seeing her has changed, but her character was always there, it was just waiting to be discovered. I started looking at everything that happened before the overture begins and exploring her backstory—her father dies when she’s 16, she’s in Paris and, thankfully, she’s with the Girys, who are old family friends. But her father gets sick and dies very unexpectedly, so her whole reason for everything—her provider, her father, her best friend—is suddenly gone.”
“There’s not a lot of choices for women in this position in 1890s France. Madame Giry very kindly offers to take Christine under her wing and says, ‘You can come to the ballet school. I can teach you how to dance. Maybe you can make it into the ballet chorus.’ She hadn’t been a ballet dancer; she hadn’t trained for this. She always liked music, but this was not a career path that she was inclined toward. But she said yes to that. Her being the ballet girl that we see in Act One from the get-go already said so much about her before the show even starts. Christine decided, ‘Yes, this is the path I want to go down.’ And telling her story 40 years after and getting to have that moment with her and have that first flicker of ambition and give it its own little moment to glow, we get to see her in the light that’s always been there. It’s a hard little glow to see when there’s so much stage light around her.”
Team ‘Phantom’ has a problem
Centering Christine forced Craig to reevaluate one character she’d never had much interest in defending: Raoul. After all, she had been Team Phantom since she was 13.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “I like the dark, mysterious man. But being in Christine’s head, I had to justify why Raoul is such a compelling romantic choice, which I’ve never wanted to do before. He’s always been kind of this milquetoast version of Phantom. But it was really lovely to go through and say, ‘Okay, this was her first love. What did that look like? What was their relationship like before the opera house, before all of these terrible things happened and put them in this perilous situation that they’re in?’ Getting to see how lovely that first love could be and why she is drawn to that—it is a safer, simpler choice, but it’s a choice that makes her happy. She has good memories of him. Her father was alive when they were together the first time. All of that made a really compelling choice for Raoul. And at the end of it, I was, like, ‘Maybe she did make the right choice. Maybe teenage Erin was wrong.’
The Phantom himself is likewise transformed—not because Craig fundamentally changes him, but because the reader now experiences the gradual evolution of Christine’s perception of him.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “He’s always been kind of this mythical, legendary figure, very mysterious. I wanted to have Christine see him as both. He is this very mythical, magical, supernatural force to begin with. She thinks at one point that it’s the ghost of her father, and then it’s the Angel of Music and it’s all these things. Then I wanted to strip it away so that he’s a man. We get to see her wander through his basement world and see him tinkering with the automatons and the actual cogs and wheels of how he does all these magic tricks. He’s a genius, but it’s a man at the end of the day. Raoul was the first love, but I think Phantom’s the first time she felt true desire and passion, the emerging of her sexuality and all of that. And because we’re in her head, we get the first kind of, ‘Ooh’ dream of what could be under that mask and all these things, but then we do see him as he truly is.”
Part of the family
For Craig, there remains something almost impossible about seeing her name attached to The Phantom of the Opera. The story has been interpreted and reinterpreted for generations and Our Strange Duet now permanently becomes part of that lineage—something Craig is keenly aware of.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “It’s humbling. Very much so. I remember when they sent over the brief with what the Andrew Lloyd Webber timeline is, all of the stuff that makes the musical the musical version, not any other thing. And they said something like, ‘We’re so honored to welcome Erin into this.’ It was just such a goosebump-getting moment. This is the show that I loved, and it was my super-niche kind of thing for so long. Now to be part of that and to be a colleague with them and to be part of the family—it’s mind-blowing.”
Which brings things back to the 13-year-old basketball player who sat in Toronto’s Pantages Theatre in 1998 and wondered how she could possibly make this world part of her life. Craig still has photographs from that trip and sometimes she imagines what might happen if she could somehow show that girl where all of this was heading.
ERIN A. CRAIG: “This whole process has kind of brought her back, though I don’t know that I ever completely lost her. I love my fandom super hard, but this one has always been so special. I’m a giant pack rat, so I’ve been going through all the, ‘Oh, here’s all the pictures my mom took of us going to see the show at Pantages in Toronto,’ and seeing very short-haired, basketball-playing Erin. There are so many moments where I wish I could go back and be, like, ‘Guess what we get to do?’ And I think she’d be, like, ‘Wait, we’re not going to play in the WNBA? Where did you go wrong in life?’ But then I think she would just be so giddy and just full of squeals and pterodactyl screaming and just utter joy and happiness over the weird twist of events that have happened in our life that led us to this moment.”
Soundcore Anker Space 2 Bluetooth 6.1 Over-Ear Headphones, Travel-Ready | Active Noise Cancelling, 50H Playtime, LDAC Hi-Res, Dual Connection, Clear Calls, Nap Mode, Wearing Detection, Fast Charging
$129.99 (as of August 28, 2026 03:10 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
GHOST Energy Drink, Zero Sugars, 12-Pack, Welch's Grape, 16oz | Energy & Focus Pre Workout Drink, No Artificial Colors, Gluten-Free, Vegan - 200MG Natural Caffeine, L-Carnitine, Taurine
$29.99 (as of August 28, 2026 02:58 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
Sony WH-CH520 Wireless On-Ear Bluetooth Headphones with Microphone, Black | Comfortable Lightweight Design, Up to 50 Hrs Battery with Quick Charging, Multipoint Connection, Clear Calls, Swivel design
(as of August 28, 2026 03:04 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
Babole Pet Girl Dog Collar for Small Dogs - Cute Pink Plaid Puppy Collar, Soft Adjustable Spring Summer Female Dog Collars with Quick Release Buckle S
$11.99 (as of August 28, 2026 03:04 GMT +00:00 - More infoProduct prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on [relevant Amazon Site(s), as applicable] at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.)
Post Comment