A hundred years ago, two monsters came to England. One, from Hungary, was driven by a thirst for human blood; the other, from Egypt, had a need for vengeance that would only be satisfied by a human sacrifice. The public welcomed them with open arms. They were Bram Stoker's Dracula and Richard Marsh's The Beetle.

Both became bestsellers, but initially The Beetle got the warmer reception. By 1913 it was in its fifteenth printing while Dracula was only in its tenth. The Beetle made it to the silver screen in 1919; Dracula only caught up in 1922. But soon after, The Beetle lapsed into obscurity while its rival went on to become the most famous horror of all time, leaving Richard Marsh's lasting contribution to modern supernatural fiction seeming to be not his literary works, but those of his grandson, the master of the subtle-weird, Robert Aickman. But as this is its centenary, The Beetle has been resurrected, both in paperback (by Pocket Classics) and as a one-and-a-half-hour adaptation on Radio 4.

The two books, Dracula and The Beetle, have a lot in common. Both start with a character entering the monster's abode, where they are unwillingly forced to serve its evil ends before escaping to tell their story. Both feature a heroine with three suitors who becomes the object of the monster's desire, and both end with a chase by train. The monsters are similar too. Both have the power to dominate the will of lesser men, can change shape, and are driven by lust. Both could serve as metaphors for vengeful venereal disease.

But the Beetle is not a lone individual like Count Dracula. It is part of an ancient cult, the Children of Isis, who spend their time sacrificing young white women and forcing young white men into lives of debauchery. Paul Lessingham is one such man, but he has put the episode behind him and built a career as a successful politician and hero of the people. He is on the verge of marrying the book's heroine, Marjorie Lindon, when his past comes looking for him.

The Beetle is a very readable book. Like Dracula it tells its story through the statements of several characters: a homeless man forced to serve the Beetle, scientist Sidney Atherton, heroine Marjorie Lindon, and, finally, Augustus Champnell, a "confidential agent". Although Paul Lessingham is the victim of the horror, Sidney Atherton is the focus of the book. Having had his marriage proposal to Miss Lindon turned down in favour of Lessingham, he toys with the idea of murdering his rival. He has just developed a killer gas which, he believes, will become the "ultimate deterrent" in future wars, and captures what he believes to be Paul Lessingham's cat with the intention of trying his invention out on it, as a sort of warm-up. It is at this point that the Beetle appears, and proposes that they work together to destroy Lessingham.

By bringing the creatures of folklore to "modern day" London, the authors of Dracula and The Beetle were pitting the monsters of the irrational against the rationality of science. When the Beetle transforms itself into a monstrous scarab before his eyes, Sidney Atherton immediately produces the Latin name of its species. When it threatens to overwhelm him with its hypnotic power, Atherton turns on an electrical generator, which impresses it as being a magic superior to its own. Both the Count and the Beetle are forced to retreat before the tide of scientific rationalism. The Beetle's sticky end comes about by the aid of one of science's advances, the passenger train.

This sticky end is just one of the things wrong with the book — it happens both "off-screen" and entirely by chance (the real defeat of the Beetle is in the science vs. magic confrontation mentioned above, which happens halfway through the book). The Beetle is an ill-defined creature compared to Dracula, and although this is part of its power (it slips creepily between scarab-form and that of a grotesque human), all fantasy needs established ground rules that are clear to the reader as well as the writer in order to work. As the Beetle's limitations and powers are never really laid out, it is difficult to appreciate its threat. Perhaps because of this, it takes a back seat to the human drama going on — Atherton's moral dilemma, Lessingham's fear of the skeleton in his cupboard — and the book's slightly comic tone dissipates its threat when the creature is not actually present.

So, while The Beetle's story is better told than Dracula (particularly the suspenseful chase at the end, the point where Dracula, for me, fizzles out), it doesn't have the power to make it live on in the mind afterwards, which may explain why Dracula has survived where The Beetle hasn't.