The Egyptian curse that hounds the protagonist of “Third Time Lucky” (in The Pearlkillers), the plague of frogs that assails the central couple of “Friends in the Country” (in The End of Tragedy), the soul-swapping plot that seems to ensnare a young boy in “Be My Guest,” the good luck charm whose loss almost kills the heroine’s lover in “Correspondent” (in Times Like These) - all may have perfectly natural explanations, yet the mere suggestion of occult agency, once taken root in the characters’ minds, exerts a force as compelling as anything overtly supernatural. Ingalls’s depiction of the marvelous and uncanny is usually ambiguous, though it can sometimes be stunningly overt. In Ingalls’s fiction, leaps of visions, lapses of memory, sudden eruptions of desire, threaten to explode and fragment the otherwise meticulously recorded normalcy of everyday life. It made me feel transported, as though I had seen into another dimension, or been granted a special freedom or a miraculous talent not normally available to mankind. Just to see such a phenomenon, to have had the ability to see it, convinced me for a moment that I had participated in the workings of the supernatural.
George and the Nightclub” (in Something to Write Home About), the narrator, fooled by a trick of vision that makes it appear as if a ship under full sail has traversed a city street, muses: Her other early titles, while essentially mimetic, flirt with Gothic elements always, a shimmer of the numinous seems to hover on the margins of the action. Her first novella, Theft (published as a freestanding title in 1970 before being gathered into Something to Write Home About), is a somber allegory, drawing equally on Kafka and the New Testament, of the degradation of spirit characteristic of a purely secular society - a society that, in her minimalist depiction, could be located either in ancient or in future times. When trying to describe the queer effects of her fiction, critics have repeatedly grasped at odd comparisons - “Edith Wharton meets Shirley Jackson” or “the lovechild of John Collier and Joyce Carol Oates.” For all its hybrid echoes, however (and I would add Isak Dinesen and Robert Aickman to the list of comparisons), Ingalls’s work is sui generis and deserves to be encountered on its own terms.įrom the start of her career, Ingalls has deployed non-realist modes of storytelling to convey her stark vision of the modern world.
Ingalls’s characteristic hesitation between mimetic and fantastic modes likely also explains some of the difficult reception of her work.
Because of their unwieldy lengths, her tales have seldom been anthologized, and few of them have appeared in journals or magazines. Ingalls’s failure to reach a wide audience has been attributed to her fondness for the novella form, of which she is an acknowledged master. (The British editions have varying titles and contents.) Three Masquerades (2017), released in February by Pharos Editions, re-sorts stories previously published. Caliban, she has written only one other novel, Binstead’s Safari (1983), and 26 long stories or novellas, assembled in the United States in I See a Long Journey (1985), Something to Write Home About (1988), The Pearlkillers (1986), The End of Tragedy (1987), Be My Guest (1991), and Times Like These (2005). The author’s backlist is not extensive: aside from Mrs. The reclusive Ingalls, an American author resident in London since 1965, may finally be poised for the literary success that has always eluded her: Hampton Fancher, fresh off the buzz surrounding Blade Runner 2049 (2017), has reportedly penned a screenplay of the novel, which is now being shopped around, and New Directions may release other Ingalls titles in the future. Caliban, a remarkable little novel that has been in and out of print since it first appeared from Faber & Faber in 1982. ON NOVEMBER 28, New Directions Press will release a new edition of Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs.