“…in an instant she had vanished, and where, not a moment before, she herself had been, I found myself confronting a monstrous beetle,- a huge writhing creation of some wild nightmare. “

Marsh pg. 245

When Paul Lessingham is first introduced to the creature known as the Beetle, he is a young man in Egypt and becomes seduced not under his own will by a woman who later transforms into the monster. This quote is the moment she changes her appearance and Lessingham is shown the horrifying emergence of the Beetle.

A monster is determined by the contemporary views of society and greatly influenced by your surroundings. Everyone has different determinations of a what a monster entails. It can include some things (visually frightening like Frankenstein) or a completely different set of characteristics (such as greedy politicians). This quote from Ortis-Robles calls to question the relation between animal and monster.

“These monsters are monstrous only to the extent that they
violate the protocols and conventions that sustain the mimetic logic of the literary ecology they inhabit, which must accordingly assert its priority by rejecting that which falls outside its purview.”

Ortiz-Robles pg 2

For this reason, as similar with other monstrous novels, it would be interesting to hear from the creatures point of view. If we had heard the story from the point of The Beetle would we see Paul Lessingham as a monster instead? For the creature to decide Lessingham is worthy of its time and effort to terrorize, I’m sure we would see the reasoning why and potentially have some empathy for it. Why does a monster terrorize who it does?