The Beetle is an 1897 horror novel by British writer Richard Marsh. In the novel, a fantastic being "born of neither god nor man," with hypnotic and magical abilities, hunts British politician Paul Lessingham through late-19th-century London in quest of retribution for the desecration of a sacred tomb in Egypt. Marsh develops a story of dread, late imperial fears, and the "return of the repressed," through which the crisis of late imperial Englishness is portrayed, in imitation of numerous popular fiction genres of the late nineteenth century.
