High-Victorian Horror meets 50s pulp mayhem: Richard Marsh’s The Beetle!

Pictured here is the cover of the 1959 WDL Books edition of Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. The Beetle was a high-Victorian fin de siècle masterpiece of horror and suspense, published in 1897, the same year as the more famous Dracula, and every bit its equal, which gives you some idea of how highly I rate it. The plot revolves around the idea of a mysterious shapeshifting supernatural entity, the Beetle of the title, who has made his way to London in order to carry out some political shenanigans, arranging the theft of important letters from the desk of an MP (very much in the spirit of the fiction of the times!) and has the power to mesmerise his victims to make them do his bidding. It is inspired by the mass boom in archaeological investigation that was centred on the tombs of the Egyptian pharaohs, and has a genuinely scary atmosphere, palpable with dread. The cover shows a gorgeous girl (likely Marjorie Lindon, the novel’s heroine) being menaced by the repulsive Beetle (in scarab form, of course!), in eye-popping ‘technicolor’ and fuses an awesome ‘50s pulp sensibility with the arch-Gothic Victorian horror of its story. I am a huge fan of these classic novels repackaged in ‘pulp’ format and am delighted to share this. (Richard Marsh was, as some will know, the grandfather of the late, great novelist Robert Aickman).