Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. Where is the movie?Īn amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale. The love story is a delight, the social commentary sharp, the writing funny and fun-and yet the sorrow, even bitterness, at the core of this book about our perfidious species is inescapable and profound. The plot unfolds brilliantly and heartbreakingly from there. I have suffered so much already.” His name is Larry, he loves avocados, he is a tireless and attentive lover-and Fred is home so little, he doesn’t even notice that Dorothy's amphibian boyfriend is living in their guest room. Then, the very evening after she hears a radio report of a monster who has killed two people and escaped from the facility where he was being held, her screen door opens and a 6-foot-7-inch creature, with the bulging forehead and flat nose of a frog and the body of an attractively hunky man, shoulders his way in and stares straight into her face. Dorothy has one great friend, Estelle, who draws out “other people’s subversive instincts,” offering sherry and laughter to break up the long afternoons, but it’s not enough. After the death of their young son, followed by a miscarriage, her despair, his affair, and, finally, the running-over of their Jack Russell terrier, this marriage is more of a house-sharing arrangement than any comfort to anyone. He will be late, he says, not even troubling to come up with an excuse for why.
We meet the very dear character Dorothy Caliban at home, sending her husband, Fred, off to work. Caliban was originally published in 1982 to raves that compared it to works by Edgar Allan Poe, David Lynch, Richard Yates, and Angela Carter, not to mention E.T., King Kong, and “Beauty and the Beast”-which only shows how sui generis it really is. Thanks to the support of writers like Daniel Handler and Rivka Galchen, who introduces this novella, the marvelous Ingalls ( Three Masquerades, 2017, etc.) has been rescued from obscurity with reissues of her books. A lonely housewife gets a new lease on life in the strong, green arms of a sea monster.
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