GildedGrouse reviewed The Beetle by Richard Marsh
Extremely fun, if dated.
4 stars
I decided to read this since it was published the same year as Dracula and outsold it. It is also invasion horror. Compared to Dracula, it is much more obviously coming from a place of colonial anxiety. That is, it carries the Orientalism and sexual anxiety of its time. If you can't stand a "racist" book, avoid. If you find Victorian anxieties more interesting than offensive, it is a good read for historical sociology.
Personally, I just read it because I wanted to read an old spooky adventure. In that department, Marsh delivers. The prose is simple, but often funny. Multiple perspective characters with incomplete information help and hinder one another. The tension holds the entire time, first as "what?" then as a long-unanswered "why?". Once we get the "why" we are swept into a nice final chase. Very fun. I can see why it outsold Dracula- it is …
I decided to read this since it was published the same year as Dracula and outsold it. It is also invasion horror. Compared to Dracula, it is much more obviously coming from a place of colonial anxiety. That is, it carries the Orientalism and sexual anxiety of its time. If you can't stand a "racist" book, avoid. If you find Victorian anxieties more interesting than offensive, it is a good read for historical sociology.
Personally, I just read it because I wanted to read an old spooky adventure. In that department, Marsh delivers. The prose is simple, but often funny. Multiple perspective characters with incomplete information help and hinder one another. The tension holds the entire time, first as "what?" then as a long-unanswered "why?". Once we get the "why" we are swept into a nice final chase. Very fun. I can see why it outsold Dracula- it is an easy read and the tension and confusion are present almost until the end.
I do think, regardless of how uninteresting old Orientalism can be (we have all seen it a million times!), the gender dynamics in the book are very interesting. The titular horror itself is horrifying (to a Victorian audience) partially due to gendered expectations and subversion. More satisfying to my modern mind, the male perspective characters are all petty, posturing, even immoral. The female perspective character of course gets her damsel-in-distress moment, but she is intelligent and has serious agency.
Come for the fun old-school horror adventure, stay for the comedy-of-manners moments and awesome lady characters.
