The novel confirms that Erik has traveled to multiple countries including France, Russia, Persia, and northern Vietnam, learning various arts and sciences from each region.

One such popular literary adaptation is the Susan Kay novel Phantom (1990), a fictional in-depth story of Erik from the time of his birth to the end of his life at the Paris Opera House.

However, Kay (as explained in her Author's Note) changes and shapes the character to match her own vision, influenced by other adaptations besides the original.

[citation needed] He offers to teach Christine Daaé to sing after hearing her working in the costume shop, and falls in love with her.

[citation needed] This storyline was also the basis for the 1990 miniseries starring Charles Dance, Teri Polo, and Burt Lancaster as Carriere.

His skin is yellowed and tightly stretched across his bones, and only a few wisps of dark brown hair are behind his ears and on his forehead.

According to the Persian, Erik was born with this deformity and was exhibited as le mort vivant in freak shows earlier in his life.

Erik sometimes plays up his macabre appearance, such as sleeping in a coffin as if he was a vampire; he also costumes as the titular character from Edgar Allan Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death" for the masked ball.

The result was allegedly so frightening to the women of the time that theaters showing the movie were cautioned to keep smelling salts on hand to revive those who fainted.

The deformity in the musical includes a gash on the right side of his partially balding head with exposed skull tissue, an elongated right nostril, a missing right eyebrow, swollen lips, different colored eyes, and a wrinkled, warped right cheek.

Film critic Roger Ebert noted that Butler was more "conventionally handsome" than his predecessors "in a GQ kind of way".

[2] The 1998 film adaptation starring Julian Sands as Erik is notable in that the character is not deformed and has instead a classically handsome face.