Books like phantom

Phantom is a 1990 novel by Susan Kay, based on the 1910 Gaston Leroux novel The Phantom of the Opera. It is a biography of the title character, Erik.

The Phantom is born as Erik in Boscherville, a small town not far from Rouen, in the summer of 1831. His mother is the beautiful and talented daughter of an English woman and a French architect, a spoiled and vain woman who scorns her deformed child from birth, puts a mask on his face, and cannot bring herself to name him. Instead, she instructs the elderly priest who baptises him to name the child after himself. Due to his mother's shame but also for his own safety, Erik is forced to spend his childhood locked in his home lest he or his mother become a target for the violent attentions of the superstitious villagers of Boscherville.