The Beetle (Annotated)

First published in 1897, Richard Marsh's The Beetle is a sensational Gothic novel of pursuit, possession, and imperial dread. Its shape-shifting Egyptian antagonist invades late-Victorian London, unsettling boundaries of gender, race, class, and rational authority. Told through multiple narrators, the novel combines melodrama, detective fiction, occult horror, and fin-de-siècle anxieties, standing...