The Beetle by Richard Marsh

In reading criticism of Victorian Gothic fiction, I had read so much about this book that I didn't bother reading it for ages, but I'm really glad I did now. It's a really bizarre late Victorian horror story about an ancient Egyptian scarab god (or something like that, it's never really made clear what it is), of indeterminate gender, trying to wreak its vengeance on a respectable MP who, twenty years previously, made the mistake of sleeping with it. Like many neglected Victorian novels, it's really frank about sex and quite explicit in terms of horror, I actually found it quite scary (especially because I don't like insects). But the really weird thing about it is that it's also hilarious. One of the characters, Sydney Atherton, has a totally infections and lovable personality, and speaks in delightful Victorian slang. A lot of the events in the book are extremely melodramatic, and some of the characters react accordingly, while others immediately chime in with a sort of skeptical common-sense voice that deflates the heightened drama, which I found really funny. For example, there's a great moment when the human form of the mysterious creature is talking to Sydney Atherton, and says that Paul Lessingham 'has spilled the blood of her who has lain upon his breast' (why do Victorians always have such dramatic ways of talking about sex?). Sydney responds with '"Spilling blood" is a figure of speech; pretty, perhaps, but vague. If you mean that Mr. Lessingham has been killing someone...' It feels like the book has its own in-built mechanism for making fun of itself, which I really liked. Also, there's a weird tendency in the book to retell stories over and over again, frequently the same events are retold from various points of view, or in different ways to different people, so that the way the same story is told varies greatly. I don't know what it means (and since I'm not writing an essay on this book I'm not going to bother), but I just thought it was an odd and interesting feature. I really enjoyed it, except for the obviously racist comments (entire misdirected, as is pointed out, the creature is constantly referred to as an 'Arab' when in fact it is from ancient Egypt, and not even human), but thought that the romance plot wasn't very convincing or interesting, since the character the heroine winds up with is very dull.