THE BEETLE (Annotated)

Published in 1897, Richard Marsh's The Beetle is a sensational Gothic romance of invasion, mesmerism, and bodily metamorphosis, set amid the nervous modernity of fin-de-siècle London. Through a shifting sequence of narrators, Marsh combines detective fiction, imperial nightmare, occult melodrama, and urban thriller, producing a text that stands beside Dracula as a key expression of late-Victorian ...