If you read Dracula and thought: “I like the ancient shapeshifting nemesis and the homoerotic subtext, but I don’t like how subtle the sexual and national anxieties are,” you’re in luck! Editor, reviewer, and scholar Marisa Mercurio is here to talk about not-so-subtle horrors in Richard Marsh’s 1897 novel The Beetle.

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• Guest: Marisa Mercurio
• Title: The Beetle by Richard Marsh
• Host:Jake Casella Brookins
• Music byGiselle Gabrielle Garcia
• Artwork byRob Patterson
• Opening poem by Bhartṛhari, translated by John Brough
• Chopin's "Minute Waltz" performed by Alfred Cortot
• Berlioz's "Symphonie Fantastique" performed by the Cleveland Orchestra, conducted by Artur Rodzinski

References:

• • Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr
  • Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca & Don't Look Now
  • Alex Woodroe's The Night Ship
  • Tenebrous Press
  • Bram Stoker's Dracula
  • Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot
  • E.R. Eddison's Zimianvian trilogy
  • Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness
  • Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde
  • Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
  • Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes
  • Kate Beaton’s “The Horror Of The New Woman”
  • H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau
  • Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis
  • The Fly films (Kurt Neumann 1958; David Cronenberg 1986)
  • Phase IV directed by Saul Bass
  • Robert Repino's Mort(e)
  • The Nest by Gregory A. Douglas, and the “Valancourt Paperbacks from Hell”
  • Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe
  • Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey
  • The Female Detective by Andrew Forrester
  • Wilkie Collins
  • The However Improbable podcast
  • Marisa’s bluesky