In an interview with the New York Times in 1986 – one of the years of her revivification, when the British Book Marketing Council named Mrs Caliban one of the 20 best American postwar novels – she gave a quote that has been invoked in almost every consideration of her writing since, regarding its “odd, unsaleable length”. They are things, outcast forms like the creatures who call to her women through windows, creeping, caught between two worlds. No one wants novellas, or suggests that you write one, or lights up when you tell them you have an idea for a 117-page story. The eight stories newly collected in No Love Lost: The Selected Novellas of Rachel Ingalls are evidence of a call in the night. We are the unimaginative husbands, and she left us long ago for someone bigger, better, glorious. I am here to say, however, that we are dealing with a freak, who never needed us at all, who does not need us now. (Binstead’s Safari also includes group sex in a balloon, another possible untapped market.) But none of our efforts has been entirely successful, has it? A dozen abject introductions have been written – read her, we beg, rescue her, as if she is one of her own inert female figures. On the strength of these two novels, there has been a manful attempt to expand her audience to readers of cryptid pornography, which hasn’t been entirely successful. Or perhaps you know her for Binstead’s Safari (1983), recently re-released by New Directions, in which an unfulfilled housewife named Millie goes on safari with her anthropologist husband and finds herself blooming, in love and being invoked in songs about the lion god and his lion bride.
He has been so heavily experimented upon that just about the first thing he does is pop a boner for her, though maybe this is testament to her desirability – we want to believe it is, that she is God’s ripest avocado for him. If you know Rachel Ingalls, you probably know her for Mrs Caliban (1982), in which a grief-stricken, unhappily married woman named Dorothy falls in love with a 6ft 7in frogman recently escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research.
Who would be there to receive it, I wondered, if I finally filled it out and mailed it? I spotted it on a high shelf as a woman’s voice came incongruously in my ear, “And then my co-worker said, ‘Say, did you and your husband ever try roleplay?’ ” That was her kind of line, I thought, tossed off by a background character at a dinner party that is about to turn strange, as I flipped over the postcard to read, “We thought you might want to share your thoughts on Rachel Ingalls’s magical novellas with a friend.” This struck me as funny. My particular prize was a copy of The Pearlkillers (1986), purchased in Florida with the promotional materials still inside. In the past, in order to read Rachel Ingalls, you had to be a collector.
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