A mysterious oriental man known only as 'the Beetle' terrorises london with his unearthly powers of hypnosis and shape-shifting. Written by British author Richard Bernard Heldmann under the pseudonym of Richard Marsh, this book was published in the same year as 'Dracula', and was initially more successful than Bram Stoker's now more famous work. Like Dracula, and other books of the time such as Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu novels, this was also of the 'sensation novel' genre, building up the suspense surrounding a mysterious villain by narrating the story from several viewpoints.
