Guest post written by Sing the Night author Megan Jauregui Eccles
Megan Jauregui Eccles is a former soprano who holds a BA in Music from the University of San Diego and an MFA in Fiction from University of California Riverside, Palm Desert. When she’s not milking goats or rehoming rattlesnakes on her ranch in the foothills of San Diego, she plays Dungeons & Dragons with her five young sons and newborn baby girl, and talks about books @literaturelipstick on Instagram and TikTok.
About Sing the Night: Discover a fantastical story inspired by The Phantom of the Opera, as musical magicians compete for the once-in-a-lifetime role as the King’s Mage, but only if their magic—or fellow contestants—don’t destroy them first—perfect for fans of Leigh Bardugo and Erin Morgenstern. Out March 10th 2026.
We mark the success of a work of literature by its lasting impact through history, something that can’t be measured by lists or sales. Only the passage of time can solidify a work as a classic, something that transcends tropes and trends and cultural zeitgeist. Once deemed classic, these works tend to garner obsessive love of loathing, often pushed for deeper study in high school homerooms and college literature classes.
Which means, inevitably, these seminal works become the foundation for future art.
Of course, we are influenced but the literature that made us readers. There will always be a little bit of Peter S. Beagle’s dark whimsy in my writing, a slice of LM Montgomery’s lush hope, a sliver of Dianna Wynn Jones’ wry, magical wit. But to take on a beloved behemoth and retell it is something else entirely. It’s taking another author’s work and reforging it, reshaping it to make it our own, often to repaint or repair a wish or a wound for the new author. This can be a dangerous walk, a treacherous path we willingly tread to take a story we love and make it our own.
There is a degree of deference that we allow classic literature, taking into account the context in which they were written. While we can and should be critical of the literary offering, we don’t apply the same moral and ethical judgments we do modern literature. The classics serve as historical capstones that give us insight to a world we no longer inhabit, a world we were made from but can never truly go back to. That does not mean those stories can’t be respectfully improved upon or retold in a way that touches upon our modern sensibilities.
The way in which Jay Rivera-Herrans approaches sex and fidelity in Epic, his retelling of Homer’s The Odyssey is defined by a modern understanding of faithfulness, rather than what we understand of Ancient Greece. Percival Everett’s James gives voice to the enslaved character that was previously only seen through a white child’s eyes and offers the new perspective as a companion—with full voice and agency—to the original. For She Is Wrath by Emily Varga borrows the shape and feeling of The Count of Monte Cristo in the context of a gender-swapped Pakistani narrative, with magic and moral ambiguity in a fast-paced, deliciously voicey new context that makes the classic feel fresh and accessible to a modern audience in a way that adds to the conversation, instead of taking away from the original.
For me, The Phantom of the Opera has always been a story that I’ve wanted to retell. I wrapped myself in the work and adaptations of Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel, deliciously obsessed and already conceiving ways that the story could be adapted and retold in a way that centered Christine and gave her a voice. In both the novel and the Andrew Lloyd Weber adaptation, Christine is experienced through the lens of men, and while she does have more agency in the original novel, I wanted her to, pun intended, sing. Not just for Erik or Raoul, but for herself.
Enter Selene, the heroine of Sing the Night, who is more than just an ingenue and a motivator for the men in the story. She is all wanting, all ruthless ambition, all hunger. This is an intentional deviation from the source material, a modern approach to add richness and complexity to a character who comes off unfairly simple. As a result, Selene is not always likeable, that word that we toss around when talking about women and rarely seem to apply to men. She is driven to the point of selfishness, her relentlessness bleeds into recklessness. And the men around her—while carrying their own character arcs—serve her story by design.
I am not attempting to scold Gaston Leroux for not writing his book in the way that I would write it. This is in no way a teardown of the original, merely an examination of the themes, plot points, and aspects of the original that drew me in stitched with my interests, experiences, and magical inclinations. There are so many stories that spark a series of wild what-ifs in me, that make pull me in and make me want to stay. Retelling is a way of lending my voice to something that I already love and pulling new readers in for the ride, hoping that they will follow me into the past and experience the original with the same zeal.
Perhaps there is some degree of audacity that comes from retelling a classic. This may be a great feat of hubris, to take someone else’s work and forge it through our own narrative fires. And while that may be the case, I will read almost any classic retelling you offer me, eager for the comfort the of the familiar narrative beats and hungry for the way in which the author makes it their own. It’s not the shape of a story that makes it special, not the set characters or setting, but the storyteller’s voice, perspective, and unique experiences that give a story meaning. The narrator and narrative if inexorably intertwined. You cannot separate the art from the artist, because we are one in the same.
Even Shakespeare retold his version of the Trojan War in The Tragedy of Troilius and Cressida, offering what was a new perspective then and may be retold again in our modern world. And while I may never know if Sing the Night becomes a classic, I am proud to connect it to a long history of classic retellings. Indeed, it is our duty to recontextualize great stories into the modern understanding to keep those works alive and use the adapted works as an arrow pointing to the original, a link in a long chain connecting stories across time. And while I may never know if Sing the Night becomes a classic, I am proud to connect it to a long history of classic retellings.
