The Selected Novellas of Rachel Ingalls. Review

Review by Neil Mackay

IT’S been a long time since I felt the need to tell everyone I meet that they must beg, borrow or steal the book I’ve just read. If I had unlimited money, I’d buy every copy of every book Rachel Ingalls has written and hand them out free on the street like a demented evangelist.  

Two weeks ago, I picked up No Love Lost, a collection of eight Ingalls stories. Since then, I have read everything she’s written. Finding Ingalls was like finding my shadow. She died in 2019 aged just short of 80, without achieving any real fame. That fact leaves me half crazy with confusion. How did we overlook her? Some say it was the form she chose: the short story and novella, hard suited to the book market. To me, she was simply a soul ahead of her time.  

Though her time has now thankfully arrived with the posthumous release of No Love Lost. It will leave you by turns speechless, terrified, delighted, bereft, broken, disgusted, enraged, bewildered, thrilled and desperate for more.  Ingalls is without peer and unbracketable, but if she sits anywhere it’s beside Shirley Jackson and Robert Aickman, two other writers who failed to get the attention they deserved in life.

Jackson is best known for her disturbing short stories dissecting the quiet domestic horror of modern American life. The devil can be sitting beside you in human form on the bus to work, in Jackson’s world of picket fences and broken souls. Her masterpiece is the folk horror The Lottery – a short story so timeless it could tell of the cruelty of ancient Athens or modern New York. Britain’s Aickman trod similar paths.

Short stories like The Hospice – a tale that still makes me shiver, even though I’m not entirely sure why – or The Swords, will never leave you. They imprint upon you until you die. That’s literary power.  I imagine Ingalls sitting with these two in the afterlife, giggling about ways to unsettle the other ghosts around them.

Ingalls’s greatest gift is to take ordinary quotidian life and shift it a few inches to the left so everything is just slightly off and wrong.  Take Friends in the Country, one of the shortest novellas in this collection. It begins with a couple hitting the road to visit some rich pals in the sticks. But fog comes down and they have to abandon their car. Is this a horror story we’re in? They arrive at the house they “think” is the right address. They’re welcomed by name, but the couple don’t know anyone there.

The house is sumptuous so they decide to bluff it out and stay for dinner. Then matters turn strange to say the least. Is that some human flesh in the soup? Why are there frogs in the bath tub? Why is everyone having sex with each other? Can the couple leave?  In Theft, we find ourselves in a prison cell with two thieves who we think may be victims of racism and police brutality in the American deep south circa 1955. But are they?

Then a raving religious maniac is dragged into the same cell. More prisoners arrive, young rebels shouting about “imperialist pigs”. It must the be the civil rights era. But after a while, you’re sure this can’t be the 20th century. Everything is off kilter. Is this story set somewhere else? Some “when” else?

As the two thieves are taken to be publicly executed on either side of the religious maniac, it’s seems Ingalls is playing some game with “the greatest story ever told”. But is she?  And she’s funny. Very funny. Ingalls scares, confuses and amuses in equal measure. In the Act tells of a depressed housewife who discovers her husband has built a lifelike sex robot. It should be a comedy, but it’s a hymn to female rage and the human desire to simply smash to bits everything that stands in our way in a literal – and I mean literal – orgy of violence.  

In Blessed Art Thou, a sexually frustrated monk, Brother Anselm, is visited by the Angel Gabriel. The angel takes the monk to bed then leaves. In the morning, Anselm has grown breasts, transformed into a beautiful woman and become pregnant. Soon all the other monks want to hang out with the attractive Anselm. Yet horror comes in the shape of society: religion will not tolerate these events.

Even if God ordered Gabriel to create a divine child with a heterosexual man, the strictures of faith demand Anselm suffer. Domesticity is often the source of horror. Ingalls’s best known work is Mrs Caliban – the story of a woman who falls in love with a strange creature, half man-half amphibian. What should be a spoof of old B Movies such as The Creature from the Black Lagoon turns into a dissection of the agony of marriage in the mid 20th century, the drudgery and submission that may break a woman’s mind to such an extent that – could she actually be imagining a monstrous lover has come to rescue her from a heartless world?  

Of all Ingalls’s work, Inheritance chills the most. A woman travels the world to find her long lost family. At first, Ingalls’s breadcrumb trail seems to hint that her family were escaped Nazis, then it seems they will be revealed as vampires. But they are something much worse. And yet, I still don’t have the words to express “what” they are, except perhaps, the reflection of everything humans should not be.  

Ingalls will always curveball you. Just when you think her territory is folk horror, social satire, or black comedy – that she’s a writer whose theme is the miserable lot of women – she comes at you with a war story called No Love Lost in which the female lead is a villain who’d make Lady Macbeth wince.  Ingalls’s canvas is huge because it’s human cruelty and stupidity, the absurdity of existence, and the desperate need people have to tell ourselves stories which save us from confronting the nightmare of living on this ball of rock spinning in space.

Yet her sparkly dark satire on the human condition is forever tender too: she afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted at every turn. For Ingalls, it is only the irredeemable who can be redeemed.