William Golding's debut novel Lord of the Flies (1954) takes its title from Beelzebub — a translation of the Hebrew Ba'al Zebub, 'Lord of the Flies' — and uses the fly and the pig's head covered with flies as its central symbol of evil, savagery, and moral dissolution. The flies that swarm over the pig's skull on the island represent the attraction of the boys to violence and the collapse of civilisation. Golding's deployment of flies and insects as signifiers of the demonic connects his work to a literary tradition extending from the Bible through Dante and Shakespeare.

Golding's Lord of the Flies placed the fly — a creature that feeds on carrion and waste and is universally associated with parasitism and decay — at the centre of one of the most widely read and influential British novels of the twentieth century. The symbolic resonances of flies in literature, which connect to Beelzebub, to the Dance of Death tradition, to Dante's worm-infested Hell, and to the actual fly-blown reality of warfare and plague, all converge in Golding's novel. Its influence on subsequent literary uses of insect imagery has been enormous.