Behind the generic titles of Rachel Ingalls’s stories lies an eccentric world of strange people who are just like you and me. I say “stories”, but the fictions in this new selection of her work, mostly from the 1970s and 80s, are really novellas, 50-80 pages long, a length that Ingalls, an American writer who lived in England and died in 2019, considered “unsaleable”. “Oh dear,” she added. “I would like to write novels.”
What Ingalls wrote instead were novels with the connective tissue removed – the sudden jolts created by this technique take some getting used to, but quickly become addictive. They often start with an odd premise and idiosyncratic people – a monk who has sex with the angel Gabriel and becomes pregnant, in Blessed Art Thou – and in whose responses to these extreme events we see something of ourselves. In Inheritance, a woman looking into her family finds a motley band of fascists whose skin causes priceless pearls to degrade.
