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"The Beetle" may have outsold "Dracula" when it first came out, but it's easy to see after reading it why "Dracula" is the one best remembered.
The idea of a man turning himself into a beetle at will is too bizarre to fall into the "it could have once happened" category, while with "Dracula" every part of the world has some form of the vampire legend.
The one place where "The Beetle" does better than "Dracula" is in the narration. Marsh limits his tale to three narrators whose stories overlap, where Stoker jumps back and forth between various letters and journals.
Unfortunately, the characters are poorly drawn and prone to utter nonsense intended to be either witty or clever and come across as neither.
And Marsh has no van Helsing to explain things. The closest he has is the detective at the end, who should have entered the picture sooner since he seems to be the only one with any sense.
"The Beetle" isn't a bad book, but it's no classic either. It reads more as a cross between an expanded "Weird Tales" adventure and a condensed "Penny Dreadful".
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