ALIQUID Lacquer Angel in Hell collection and GIVEAWAY!

Hello gentle readers! I've just released a brand new ALIQUID Lacquer collection that's perfect for Halloween! Bear with me while I talk about it, because there's a giveaway at the bottom of the post. (Or I guess you can just scroll down there immediately.)


The Phantom of the Opera has been my favorite musical for around 20 years, and the 1911 novel is one of my favorites too (I even wrote about it on this very blog). So it was the natural choice for me to base a Halloween collection on!

Rather than just naming polishes after songs in the musical (somewhat sketchy from a copyright point of view), I decided to make shades that emphasize the gothic/romantic themes in the story, as well as the contrasts between beauty/ugliness and light/dark. Take a look and tell me if I succeeded. :-)

Corpse de Ballet is a terrible pun and was inspired by the ballet girls, of course. In the book they are constantly scaring each other by spreading stories about Opera Ghost sightings. I was particularly thinking of the scene from the musical where Joseph Buquet is hanged directly above the ballerinas in the middle of a performance.

Forever and a Day represents the spiritual hold the Phantom has over Christine. I took the name from this passage in the book, where Christine passes through the mirror:

"And nothing could describe the passion with which the voice sang:

'Fate links thee to me for ever and a day!'

...Christine walked towards her image in the glass and the image came towards her. The two Christines - the real one and the reflection - ended by touching; and Raoul put out his arms to clasp the two in one embrace. But, by a sort of dazzling miracle that sent him staggering, Raoul was suddenly flung back, while an icy blast swept across his face; he saw not two, but four, eight, twenty Christines spinning round him, laughing at him and fleeing so swiftly that he could not touch one of them. At last, everything stood still again; and he saw himself in the glass. But Christine had disappeared.

He rushed up to the glass. He struck at the walls. Nobody! And meanwhile the room still echoed with a distant passionate singing:

'Fate links thee to me for ever and a day!'"

This is Maze of Mirrors. Mirrors are of course a major motif in the story and are linked to the theme of inner vs. outer beauty. In the book, the Phantom builds an elaborate torture chamber using mirrors to make Raoul and the Persian believe they're in the middle of a desert. They didn't include this in the musical, but the movie version does have a nod to it:

I had to make a polish called Red Death because, seriously, check out the Phantom's amazing outfit! I drew this probably 100 times as a kid.

 
This one is The Skeleton's Ring. In the musical, we don't learn the Phantom's ultimate fate, but in the book we are told explicitly that he died of a broken heart. This passage is from the last page of the book (the narrator is a journalist investigating the Phantom story):


"Yes, I am certain, quite certain that I prayed beside his body, the other day, when they took it from the spot where they were burying the phonographic records. It was Erik's skeleton. I did not recognize it by the ugliness of the head, for all men are ugly when they have been dead as long as that, but by the plain gold ring which he wore and which Christine Daae must have slipped on his finger, when she came to bury him in accordance with her promise.

The skeleton was lying near the little well, in the place where the Angel of Music first held Christine Daae fainting in his trembling arms, on the night when he carried her down to the cellars of the Opera-house."

Finally, here is Unending Night. Night and darkness in Phantom are moral as well as physical; the Phantom chooses to live in darkness because he's been rejected by the "normal" world of daylight.

If you're interested in picking any of these up, they're on sale for the next week at my shop! I also have a new pumpkin cheesecake lip balm scent and nail polish magnets!

OK, now on to the giveaway!!

I'm giving away the entire Angel in Hell collection to one lucky US resident! Here are the rules!

• Winner must be over 18 and be able to provide a US shipping address.
• The only mandatory entry is to provide your email address. All other entries are optional but increase your chance of winning!
• Winning entries will be verified, so no cheating!
• The giveaway will run until 11:59 PM EST on October 9, 2014.
• The winner will have 48 hours to respond to my email, otherwise a new winner will be chosen.

Good luck!!


  a Rafflecopter giveaway

2014 Blogger Challenge #3: Once upon a time...

Welcome to the third edition of the 2014 Blogger Challenge! This time the prompt was to write about a book we either love or hate. I've always been a big reader, so it was a hard choice...

Trudy obligingly agreed to pose with one of my favorite books: The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux (1911). Nearly everyone is aware of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but not everyone knows that it was based on a century-old French novel! You can see how beat-up my copy is--I've had it since probably elementary school, and I still like to go back to it now and then.

If you've been in an opera house basement all your life and don't know the basic plot (which is the same in the book and the musical), here it is. The Phantom, horribly disfigured from birth, lives in the labyrinthine cellars below the Paris Opera House. He is a genius, a great singer, composer, inventor and magician, and he uses his talents to control and terrorize the employees of the Opera. He is also completely emotionally warped, since he's had no compassion from anyone in his life thanks to his terrifying appearance. He falls in love with a young singer named Christine Daae, and starts giving her singing lessons as a disembodied "Angel". Christine, still traumatized by the death of her father, is easily ensnared by this heavenly voice. Then her childhood sweetheart Raoul turns up, and things start to turn ugly...(I won't spoil the rest for you.)

The book differs from the musical in some important ways that I think make it a more powerful story. First, in terms of looks, the Phantom is definitely more of a Lon Chaney than a Gerard Butler (who manages to look sexy even with his mask off):

Like this...                                                               not this.

The Phantom looks like a living skeleton and smells like a grave. He is not a sexy guy. So, while in the musical we want Christine and the Phantom to get together because hey, if he kept his mask on I would totally hit that...in the book we understand Christine's horror of him, and her compassion is even more extraordinary for it. The Phantom is more a truly tragic figure than a romantic antihero.

Another thing I like about the book is that the characterizations and drama are ramped up compared to the musical: the Phantom is more dangerous, more terrifying and at the same time more pathetic; Christine is more fragile and naive; and the stakes in the final showdown are even higher. There is also a lot of humor in the book in the form of the two Opera managers and Madame Giry, the batty old box attendant, who are exaggerated almost to the point of satire.

The author, Gaston Leroux, was originally a journalist who switched to writing mystery novels (and was pretty famous for them in France at the time), and both these careers influenced the novel. It's written as an account of real events, as the narrator starts by talking about some documents he found relating to the Phantom affair, and parts of the book are in the form of interviews. Leroux also invented some crazy ingenious devices the Phantom used to get around the Opera House and fight off any intruders, and they're a lot of fun to read about (some play a big part in the plot).

I'll finish up with a quote from the scene where Christine sees the Phantom's face for the first time:

'...But imagine, if you can, Red Death's mask suddenly coming to life in order to express, with the four black holes of its eyes, its nose and its mouth, the extreme anger, the mighty fury of a demon; and not a ray of light from the sockets, for, as I learnt later, you cannot see his blazing eyes except in the dark...I fell back against the wall and he came up to me, grinding his teeth hideously, and, as I fell upon my knees, he hissed mad, incoherent words and curses at me. Leaning over me, he cried, "Look! You want to see? See! Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's face! Now you know the face of the voice!"...And, when I turned away my head and begged for mercy, he drew my head back to him, brutally, twisting his dead fingers into my hair.'

The Screamsheet has a much better review of the novel, plus comparisons with the various film and musical versions. If you like Gothic-style stories and tragic romance, pick up this book!

Don't forget to like the 2014 Blogger Challenge Facebook page or follow the hashtag #2014BloggerChallenge on Twitter to see everyone's posts!