The Beetle as a monster aligns strongly with Cohen’s second thesis that the monster always escapes. The other characters always seem to be one step behind The Beetle, with the exception of Holt in the beginning who actually stumbles into its lair. Still, Holt doesn’t have control of the situation and isn’t aware of The Beetle’s plan, so he has no capacity to put a stop to the future events in the novel. At the end, when Lessingham, Atherton, and Champnell finally think they’ve caught the monster, it’s revealed that it has eluded them and left Miss Linden for dead. I find it interesting that after these events, life seems to go on fairly normally for the English characters in the book, albeit with a great amount of trauma. It makes me wonder what The Beetle’s actual intentions were and if it succeeded.
