The Beetle A Mystery by Richard Marsh

First published in 1897, Richard Marsh’s sensational fin-de-siècle Gothic masterpiece follows a shape-shifting, mesmeric creature from Egypt seeking vengeance against a British politician. Outselling Bram Stoker’s Dracula upon its initial release, the novel is a critical entry for queer bibliography due to its heavy subversion of Victorian gender binaries. The antagonist shifts fluidly between a man, a woman, and a scarab beetle, exerting hypnotic control and enacting acts of sexual aggression against both male and female characters. By threatening the boundaries of the domestic English home with an unclassifiable, gender-ambiguous sexuality, Marsh’s text serves as a vital historical record of late-nineteenth-century anxieties regarding homosexuality, transness, and non-normative desire.