“The beetles were closing in on her. At first, they had opened her world up. They had helped her expand into a new realm of kinship. They’d given her a glimmer of a new kind of freedom, less about streamlining, more of belonging. A vision that reduced her influence in the grander scheme of things, and let her be a creature. But now the beetles were moving in, circling her like the people she knew, threatening to displace her needs with their own.”

Marieke Bigg’s A Scarab Where The Heart Should Be (2024) does not easily fall into genres like horror or fantasy, but I think it’s worth talking about as adjacent to those terms. Particularly because this is a book very much in dialogue with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis (1915). Whereas Kafka’s Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself literally transformed into a giant insect, the protagonist of Bigg’s novel, Jacky ‘The Beetle’ McKenzie, finds herself being likened to an insect due to her off-putting, obsessive and aggressive personality, and decides to lean into it. But while Jacky does not undergo a physical metamorphosis, as she embraces her identity as the Beetle she undergoes a transfiguration of sorts, becoming even more herself as she pushes the two people who will tolerate her, her husband Mark and her girlfriend Clarissa, to the very limits. As such, A Scarab Where The Heart Should Be is a disturbing portrait of a truly toxic person, and a vivid and intense dissection of what happens when one’s perception of reality and oneself meet the resistance of consensus reality. 

Jacky McKenzie is a star architect, head of her own company and well respected for her daring and ambitious designs, whose sheer glass walls reflect their creator’s streamlined vision. Her husband Mark is co-owner of the company, a man with easy-going charm who is the public face of the project, and their open relationship allows Jacky to see her girlfriend Clarissa, a therapist who finds herself irresistibly drawn into Jacky’s orbit. As Jacky and Mark move into their masterpiece, a glass house in the countryside, it seems like Jacky has the world at her feet. At least, until Mark suggests that she do some publicity herself. A belligerent and confrontational meeting with a reporter leads to Jacky being dubbed ‘The Beetle’ in the feature, coincidentally her nickname at university amongst her classmates. Jacky sees the persona of the Beetle as an opportunity to further streamline her intwined life and artistic visions. But popular opinion soon turns against her, and Jacky finds her self-absorbed and erratic behaviour driving away the few people she cares about as she draws closer and closer to a catastrophic breakdown. 

The novel centres on the indelible character of Jacky, a woman as fascinating as she is profoundly unpleasant. We spend most of the novel inside Jacky’s head. From her perspective, everything she is doing is entirely reasonable and rational, it’s the outside world that is constantly misunderstanding her and misrepresenting her. Of course, much of the novel is about what happens when Jacky’s self-belief is challenged and she can no longer dismiss the judgement of a society that deems her unlikeable, weird and obsessive. Jacky lives by her own internally consistent rules – she sees her life as inextricably entwined with her artistic project, and her mastery of architecture is her way of controlling public and private spaces and so the way in which people behave in those spaces. Unfortunately for Jacky and those who care for her, her intense vision is entirely without regard for other people. Mark and Clarissa mediate the outside world for Jacky, but both are very much aware that the entire edifice could come crashing down at any moment due to Jacky’s destructive and erratic behaviour. 

Part of Jacky’s spectacular fall from grace is due in part to her gender – the world is much more forgiving of men who are brilliant but difficult, whose obsessions mean their ability to interact with people have atrophied. Despite the fact that she’s clearly a monster, there’s nonetheless something liberating about the way that Jacky chooses to embrace who she is in her persona as the Beetle. Jacky becomes fascinated by beetles and starts collecting them and researching them. Her obsessive notes show how she sees the insects as both aspirational and a reflection of herself, beautiful creatures evolved to fit their own specific niches that are frequently misunderstood by humans. So while the Beetle is originally meant as an insult, Jacky sees it as something to live up to. Unfortunately, in Jacky’s case this inevitably means following her own chaotic and self-destructive impulses to their fullest.

The other key characters in the book are Mark and Clarissa, both of whose perspectives we get to experience over the course of the novel. They are fascinating characters in their own right. In some ways, Mark is just as bad as Jacky. His charisma allows him to get along with people much more easily than Jacky, and he finds himself naturally in the position of publicity manager and peacekeeper. But, as Clarissa calls him out on, he’s gotten to where he has in his career by attaching himself to Jacky, and ultimately intends to sever his links with her and leave her behind when he’s had enough, leaving Clarissa to pick up the pieces. There is something profoundly cowardly and selfish about Mark, and how he is perfectly happy to benefit from Jacky’s architectural brilliance but has no intention of sticking around once things get too difficult. Clarissa is the closest thing the novel has to a straightforwardly sympathetic character, but even she feels detached from the people she is meant to be helping, and cannot help but think of her patients in terms of her own self-interest. She is, however, probably the only person who is willing to confront Jacky about her behaviour and is able to encourage her towards empathy, however long and torturous that journey would be. 

Bigg’s character work is sharp and incisive, and her prose is brutal and often darkly funny. For all that A Scarab Where The Heart Should Be is a novel about difficult people, it is never less than a joy to read. Bigg manages to keep the reader invested in her confrontational characters, drawing us in by showing us the world from their point of view whilst never for a moment excusing their bullshit. A Scarab Where The Heart Should Be is a brilliant and deeply entertaining novel, and Bigg is a master of dark psychology.

A Scarab Where the Heart Should Be is available now. You can order your copy on Bookshop.org