The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh

The Beetle (1897) by Richard Marsh; this 2004 Broadview Press edition edited by Julian Wolfreys: In 1897, Richard Marsh's The Beetle outsold that far-better-remembered horror classic, Bram Stoker's Dracula. It was a short-term victory. Nonetheless, The Beetle is a fascinating slice of fin de siècle Victorianism with an unusual narrative told by four different first-person narrators.

Julian Wolfreys' edition provides a lot of worthy commentary and context for the novel, especially in relation to the anxieties and obsessions of late-Imperial Britain. One should read his lengthy introduction after reading the novel, however -- it's one long Spoiler.

In sequence, the novel tells the story of The Beetle in the voices of a hapless, homeless, unemployed clerk; a gentleman scientist; a headstrong noblewoman engaged to a bedeviled Member of Parliament; and the Confidential Agent (what we would now call a Private Detective) hired to help sort out the Affair of the Beetle.

The eponymous Beetle is the star of the show, a shape-shifting, gender-bending emissary from demon-haunted Egypt -- as Wolfreys notes, Britain's travails in Egypt were a major source of Imperial agita in the latter part of the 19th century. Like Dracula himself, the Beetle is also a threatening Cultural Other, inscribed with a myriad of the fears of the period. 

Like X-Men: Dark Phoenix, The Beetle ends with a train chase. At least it makes period sense here. Marsh's novel is a bit murkier in its climax than Dracula, but I'll leave that for you to discover. The narrative of the poverty-stricken clerk is certainly the most emotionally affecting of the four narrative streams. Marsh also does a fine job of writing a self-aware, independent woman's POV in the third stream. 

The second stream is enjoyably wonky -- Marsh's scientist, a friend of the female narrator since childhood, is a pompous goof who's working on weapons of mass destruction (specifically poison gas) for the British Army. All of this is treated in a strangely off-hand fashion, and I'll go just a bit spoilery to note that none of the weapons research pays off in the climax of things. It's just there.

Our narrating Confidential Agent brings things to a somewhat orderly close -- mysteries remain, but like Van Helsing in Dracula, the Agent marshals the forces of Order against the invasive Other. The Beetle doesn't have the pulpy, bloody heft of Dracula, but it does have its own charms, racist and bigoted though those charms may be when it comes to any and all non-WASP characters in the novel. 

Wolfreys finishes this edition with excerpts from a number of end-of-century source texts to situate the novel further in its context. In all, this edition and the novel, recommended.