Selección Terror: Monstruo en la Ópera

About this issue

"Monstruo en la Ópera," by Curtis Garland (1975), is a Gothic horror novelette dedicated to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. The narrative opens with soprano Shawn Francis discovering something horrifying in her dressing room after a triumphant opera premiere, her scream suggesting supernatural terror. The story then shifts to London's Illustrated Police News, where young reporter Dennis Maitland writes sensationalist crime coverage he despises. He encounters Basil Cox, an acerbic music critic for the Globe, who requests archived materials about Jeanette Dauphin—"The Golden Nightingale"—a famous singer mysteriously murdered in the opera house months earlier. Her killer, the obsessed Vernon Stensgaard, is serving a twenty-year sentence despite claims of innocence. As Maitland prepares to send his current article to press, his editor Russell Scott arrives with an urgent telegraph requiring immediate coverage of a breaking story, cutting short Maitland's evening. The narrative combines operatic mystery with crime journalism, establishing an atmosphere of theatrical danger and professional ambition set in Victorian London.