But indulging Dorothy’s desires soon has darker consequences, and as the police close in on Larry, her fragile happiness begins to spiral out of control. On the run from his own traumatic past, where he was captured from his home in the ocean, experimented on and abused by unscrupulous scientists, Larry is a kindred spirit to Dorothy, and the two embark on an affair that gives spark and meaning to Dorothy’s life again. All this changes when “Aquarius the Monsterman”, or Larry as he prefers to be called, disappears from the Jefferson Institute of Oceanographic Research and shows up in her kitchen. Unable to face going through a divorce, she goes through the motions of her life, doing the housework whilst her husband is away, picking at the scabs of her unhappiness with her neighbour Estelle, dreading visits from her intolerable in-laws. Her young son is dead, she has just lost a baby to a miscarriage, and her husband is cheating on her. Reissued now by Faber Editions, Mrs Caliban should delight a new generation of fans of intelligent, literary fantasy and feminist literature.ĭorothy’s life is falling apart. But Ingalls’ masterful blending of the uncanny and the everyday remains very much her own, and nothing since has quite captured the novella’s distinctive feel. In the way it uses fairy tale motifs and subverts them to feminist ends it recalls Angela Carter’s contemporary deconstructions of the form in The Bloody Chamber (1979). In its juxtaposition of its marginalised characters eking out an existence on the side-lines of American patriarchal society with humanity’s cruelty to those it deems less than human, it anticipates Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar winning film The Shape Of Water (2017). The novella tells the story of the romance between depressed suburban housewife Dorothy and escaped fish monster Larry, in an oddly erotic mash-up of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid (1837) and B-movies like Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954). A dark feminist fairy tale that marries the domestic with the Weird, Ingall’s writings shows how the fantastic can enrich the literary and vice versa. Rachel Ingalls’ Mrs Caliban (1982) is a gloriously strange novella. But to know that it’s for ever, that I’ll always be here where I’m not able to belong, and that I’ll never be able to get back home, never…” If I had known I was only going to stay a short while, this would have been the most exciting thing I could imagine – a marvel in my life. You couldn’t have dreamed it up yourself, but somehow it all seems to work, and each tiny part is related. It’s entirely unlike anything that has ever come to your thoughts. “You know it’s wonderful to see another world.

Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls