Book review: The Beetle, by Richard Marsh

How refreshingly ignorant this story is.

In the year this stilted novel was published, 1897, it outsold Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 6 copies to 1, but the passage of time has since abandoned it. Ostensibly a horror novel, it features a monster that modern eyes would consider a timorous wee beastie, easily neutralised by a butterfly net, handful of sticky toffee papers or by putting a hat over it. A Volkswagen Beetle would be a considerably more dangerous adversary.

There’s a degree of mesmerism (deeply fashionable at the time, see H.G. Wells) and a bushman in London who is told by the white man that electricity is magic (no experience of it on the ship or in the most advanced capital city of the world at the time?). The real laugh is the author’s abject confusion of the compass points, where the Chinaman hails from Egypt and is a Mohammedan who worships the goddess Isis.

I don’t regret giving it a go but I’m glad that the Victorian era ended and storytelling has moved on.