Review: The Beetle

MARSH, Richard, The Beetle, World Distributors (Manchester) Ltd. (WDL), London, 1959.

Octavo; paperback; 256pp. Mild edgewear to the wrappers; retailer’s ink stamp to the inside front cover; text block and page edges mildly toned. Good.

I’ve referenced this book several times already in this blog, so I thought I should probably trot it out for examination. It’s actually been quite awhile since I first read this, so the re-visit was worthwhile and time has given me some perspective.

The story was first published in 1897. “Richard Marsh” (real name Richard Bernard Heldmann) was contemporaneous with Bram Stoker and was arguably better known at the time, certainly a better seller. Upon its release, The Beetle was a far more popular read than Dracula (also 1897), but for reasons, some of which I’ll outline below, the pendulum swung - deservedly – the other way. Like Dracula, The Beetle is presented as a collection of journal extracts from the various players involved, and, like that other work, it details the events surrounding an evil entity that comes to Britain for nefarious purposes. In Dracula, that entity is a vampire; in this work, the creature is not so easily identified.

Modern readers might find this fact somewhat unpalatable. The nebulous evil presented by the villain is never pinned down or pigeon-holed; its intentions are gradually revealed and it’s not until the last third of the book that we discover why it has come to London and what it seeks to do there. In this we see the very essence of “weird literature”: the strangeness is its own reward; explanation and rationalisation robs the material of its strength. The Unknown is presented to us, manifest, and its power is what we are feeling as we read.

Some details of the creature are provided: we learn that it appears very ancient and is grotesquely ugly; we are told that it has superhuman powers of hypnotic persuasion. It appears to be able to transform itself into an enormous scarab beetle, but this might well be just an hypnotic illusion. Even the question of whether it is male or female remains unsolved at the very end. This inability to pin things down might be a source of frustration to modern readers who want a story where the villain is “a Werewolf – QED”, but this is not modern horror writing. Take a deep breath and let it do its work.

That being said, there is a canon out there to which this book belongs and for which it is fundamental. Along with Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903) and H. Rider Haggard’s She (1886) and its sequel Ayesha, (1903) this is among the first of the Mummy narratives that crystallised with the release of Universal’s “The Mummy” (1932). That film brought together all of the nebulous threads of those previous works and placed them squarely in an Egyptian milieu. Here are reincarnation and resurrection; ancient love and even older magicks; fate playing games across the aeons and eternal desire. If none of this sounds even vaguely familiar, then it’s likely you’ve come to the wrong blog.

Without this book, we don’t get Anne Rice’s The Mummy (1989); we don’t get Stephen Sommers’ “The Mummy” (1999) and “The Mummy Returns” (2001); we’d probably never even have heard of Boris Karloff (alright, maybe that’s a stretch, but still). Even HPL owes a debt to this material, if not to Marsh directly, what with all of his Egyptological shenanigans beneath the pyramids involving Mr. Houdini. If you’re into the mummy-thing and you haven’t read The Beetle, then you need to catch up. That’s all I’m saying.

Certainly The Beetle is not perfect as far as tales go. In comparison with Dracula it suffers in that, as an epistolary text, it works nowhere near as well as Stoker’s effort. The first narrator sets up the story in an engaging and frank fashion and we meet him again in the narratives of the later writers; however - and I need to say “Spoiler Alert” here – he pops his clogs before the end of the book and, although there’s a furious effort to justify the existence of his manuscript, the question of how his part of the story managed to get told is an open one.

The Beetle’s quest, like the creature itself, is not obvious at first. It seems to be targeting Paul Lessingham, a parliamentarian and Reformer in the British government, for reasons unknown; later, we discover that this same individual has had some past connexion to the monster which leaves him susceptible to the very mention of the thing, or even mere drawings of scarab beetles. However, Mr. Lessingham is a rival against Sydney Atherton, Esq., for the affections of a Miss Marjorie Lindon. In short order, after all parties have expressed their keenness for the doughty Miss Marjorie, the Beetle kidnaps her and she becomes the bait for our adventurers and the object of their quest. It turns into a race against time to save her from the hideous clutches of Oriental evil.

These kinds of stories – “foreigners want to steal our women!” – were a staple of the period, as epitomised by Sax Rohmer and his Fu Manchu escapades, and they morphed in the ‘50s to movies and books about alien beings from space who wanted pretty much the same thing. Even Dracula isn’t free from this hallmark of the patriarchy and the fervid declarations of ‘rescue or vengeance’ espoused by the many male characters in that book are echoed in The Beetle. While re-reading this book I realised I had forgotten this part of the narrative and it was somewhat of a chore to have to endure this old chestnut. Still, there are some fresh innovations.

It transpires that the Beetle is a representative of a Cairene Isis cult who trapped Lessingham in an hypnotic snare whilst travelling in his youth. Whilst under duress he witnessed many sordid and horrific events, amongst them the defiling and sacrifice – by fire – of many kidnapped white women. His escape, during which he attempted to murder the high priestess, is the reason for the Beetle’s sojourn in England, and its attempts upon his life. The discussions of the depravity to which the cult has lowered itself, while veiled, are still quite frank and disturbing: this is pretty edgy stuff for Edwardian readers and still has some oomph nowadays. Add to this the fact that the monster enjoys stripping its victims naked and forcing them to run around in public (and in this case it’s naked naked, not just down to their long-johns) then this turns out to be a fairly risqué little novel.

It would be easy to discount this book as a combination of tropes and class-based psychological mores that are out of step with our current era. Certainly, it is all those things, but if we reject every book just because it wasn’t written within our own lifetimes then we may as well resign ourselves to a steady diet of Fifty Shades of Grey and all of its regurgitated sequels and clones. Many modern writers are doing nothing that hasn’t already been done anyway, so I prefer to go straight to the source. Mr Grey can jump off his penthouse roof with his handcuffs on for all I care – I’ll take Richard Marsh any day.

In the final analysis, if mummies are your thing, as stated, you need to look this up. Alternatively, if you want a template for how a group of Call of Cthulhu investigators should approach their task and how to hook in characters from various social stations in life, then this is a great little primer. If you wanted, you could lift the story entirely and run it for your friends with only a minor amount of set-up. Like most mysteries that come lurching out of Egypt, this stuff is elemental. And that makes it eternal.

Three Tentacled Horrors.