111 pages
English language
Published Oct. 29, 2017
In the quiet suburbs, while Dorothy is doing chores and waiting for her husband to come home from work, not in the least anticipating romance, she hears a strange radio announcement about a monster who has just escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research... Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls's Mrs. Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe's stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., Richard Yates's domestic realism, B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carter--how such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm.
A beautiful, funny, crushing little novel, about grief and suburban life and marriage and also a six-foot-eight fishman who walks into a woman's kitchen and life one evening.
This book has seen a slight resurgence due to its surface similarities to Guillermo Del Toro’s award-winning movie The Shape of Water, but Ingalls’ novella is a sterling love story on its own. There’s a fine discussion on its many merits here, so I’ll simply add that, as far as love stories involving women and sea monsters go, this is a winner. It’s as good as the best absurdist fantasies of [a:William Kotzwinkle|34872|William Kotzwinkle|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1276250331p2/34872.jpg] and [a:James K. Morrow|22631|James K. Morrow|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1242312093p2/22631.jpg], which, for me, is saying something.
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