A shape-changing entity pursues a British politician through fin-de-siècle London while mesmerism, disguise, and competing testimony keep its nature uncertain. The novel joins Gothic invasion fiction to Egyptian antiquity and the emerging weird tale.
Sources for Richard Marsh — The Beetle: A Mystery
Richard Marsh — The Beetle: A Mystery in First Horror Stories and Novels
Held in the First Horror Stories and Novels chamber of the Babel Nexus Index.
- Pliny the Younger — Letter on Athenodorus and the Haunted House at Athens (Citation) (100)
- William of Malmesbury — The Witch of Berkeley (from Gesta Regum Anglorum) (Citation) (1125)
- Marie de France — Bisclavret (Citation) (1180)
- Horace Walpole — The Castle of Otranto (1764)
- William Beckford — Vathek (1786)
- Ann Radcliffe — The Mysteries of Udolpho: A Romance (1794)
- Matthew Gregory Lewis — The Monk (1796)
- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley — Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
- John William Polidori — The Vampyre: A Tale (1819)
- Washington Irving — The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (from The Sketch Book) (1820)
- Charles Robert Maturin — Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
- Victor Hugo — Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) (1831)
- Jane C. Loudon — The Mummy! Or a Tale of the Twenty-Second Century (1827)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Black Cat (1843)
- Edgar Allan Poe — The Raven (1845)
- Thomas Preskett Prest / James Malcolm Rymer — Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood (1847)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh (1864)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — Green Tea (from In a Glass Darkly) (1869)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — Carmilla (1872)
- Robert Louis Stevenson — Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886)
- Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
- Bram Stoker — Dracula (1897)
- Gaston Leroux — The Phantom of the Opera (1910)
- Alexander Belyaev — Professor Dowell's Head (Citation) (1925)
- J. Sheridan Le Fanu — In a Glass Darkly (1872)
- Ambrose Bierce — Can Such Things Be? (1893)
- Algernon Blackwood — The Willows (1907)
- Algernon Blackwood — The Wendigo (1910)
- M. R. James — Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904)
- Arthur Machen — The Great God Pan (1894)
- William Hope Hodgson — The House on the Borderland (1908)
- F. Marion Crawford — The Upper Berth (1894)
- W. W. Jacobs — The Monkey's Paw (1902)
- Oliver Onions — The Beckoning Fair One (1911)
- Guy de Maupassant — Le Horla (1887)