The Beetle, Richard Marsh

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language: English
country: UK
year: 1897
form: novel
genre(s): horror, fantasy
dates read: 6.6.22-8.6.22

Richard Marsh’s The Beetle is quite wacky and quite racist — let’s get that out there right from the start. the entire plot is inseparable from the combination of Orientalism and anti-Black racism that’s tied up in the portrayal of Egypt as a mysterious, dangerous, supernatural space, as I observed last night. it’s also got the classic [Jeffrey Jerome Cohen voice] fear of indeterminacy, which in this case plays out both in the Beetle’s ambiguous human-beetle-ness and, especially from Atherton, in the treatment of the Beetle’s gender: part of what makes the Beetle unsettling for the characters is their inability to tell for certain whether it/he/she(/they) is male or female. if you can get through that, the plot is reasonably engaging, and I found it to be a quick read.

like Dracula, the novel is divided into sections with different narrators, although it’s not epistolary. the result is something that feels oddly like it was serialized (which it wasn’t) in the way it replays events: the four narrations partly overlap with each other and different sections of the story are repeated, but with more or less detail or sometimes from different perspectives. the effect is an interesting kind of folded narrative, where you regularly move back a day or two (or just a few hours, in some cases) and then move forward into the present slightly differently.

I suspect that The Beetle’s popularity relative to Dracula on its initial release is simply because The Beetle is so much more embedded in its particular cultural Zeitgeist (particularly, of course, nineteenth-century Egyptomania) and, especially, in the context of British colonialism. Egypt was both terrifyingly Other and foreign and, simultaneously, comfortably familiar, whereas Dracula ca. 1897 is simultaneously too far east to be safely familiar and not far enough east to be comfortably exotic.

one particularly fun aspect of the text is the colloquialisms and the many different registers of speech that Marsh uses: formal upper-class speech between Atherton, Lessingham, and Marjorie (and Champnell); informal upper-class speech with lots of slang when Atherton gets excited in Champnell’s section; profanity-ridden (but censored with em dashes) working-class speech at the beginning of Holt’s narration; eye dialect working-class speech in Champnell’s section; and others.

as a final note, re the “emotional” tag: what I mean by this is not that it made me emotional, but rather that all of the characters (except Champnell) are constantly on the verge of being overcome by emotions. it’s all very overwrought in the way supernatural horror so often is.

moods: emotional, mysterious, tense, wacky


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