Rachel Ingalls

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.

Mrs. Caliban

jillian tenner

"So many things are different. Colour is different. Everything that you see tells you something. At the Institute, they told me there are some people who are colour-blind. When show them, they don't believe it at first. They can't believe they suffer from this thing, because they have never known any other way. That's how difficult it would be to explain the difference in the way my world looks."

Acclaimed as among the twenty greatest post-war American novels, Mrs. Caliban has all the elements of a late-night movie: unnatural sex, a demon lover, a fatal car chase, a jasmine hint of M. Butterfly, and a dash of X-Files. A mesmerizing tale that haunts and transports the reader long after the last page.

Sarah Sammis

This one made my lunches at a terrible job the best time of the day.

Andrew John Kinney

Not my cup of tea. Funny how this story keeps reappearing, though. And either The Pisces or The Shape of Water (movie) tells the story more engagingly, in my opinion.

Chris Poore

Absolutely fascinating and impossible to put down. I found this on a New York Times list of short books you can read in a day and thought I would try it just for fun; one of its main characters is a reptile-man, after all. Instead I found a perfect little novel. I’ve been down a rabbit hole since reading about Ingalls, who has remained relatively unknown but has had a small but loyal following that has included John Updike. It’s hard to believe her stuff hasn’t seen a much broader audience. This one is easy to recommend to others.

The amphibious cult classic: a magical tale of a suburban housewife's affair with a frogman ... 'Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.' Marlon James ''Genius ... A broadcast from a stranger and more dazzling dimension.' Patricia Lockwood 'So curiously right, so romantically obverse, that it creates its own terrible, brilliant reality.' Sarah Hall 'A feminist masterpiece: tender, erotic, singular.' Carmen Maria Machado 'A devastating fable of mythic proportions ... Wondrously peculiar.' Irenosen Okojie (foreword) Dorothy is a grieving housewife in the Californian suburbs; her husband is unfaithful, but they are too unhappy to get a divorce. One day, she is doing chores when she hears strange voices on the radio announcing that a green-skinned sea monster has escaped from the Institute for Oceanographic Research - but little does she expect him to arrive in her kitchen. Muscular, vegetarian, sexually magnetic, Larry the frogman is a revelation - and their passionate affair takes them on a journey beyond their wildest dreams ... Rachel Ingalls's Mrs Caliban is a bittersweet fable, a subversive fairy tale, as magical today as it was four decades ago 'A miracle . A perfect novel.' New Yorker 'Every one of its 125 pages is perfect ... Clear a Saturday, please, and read it in a single sitting.' Harper's What Readers Are Saying: 'Maybe the most gorgeous, lyrical book ever written'***** 'A fantastic wee novel, strange and brilliant, and absolutely the inspiration for The Shape of Water.'***** 'Wonderful, sharp minimal prose offers big truths. Superb - brilliant, in fact.'***** 'Absolutely incredible. It's weird, funny, and heartbreaking, like a Richard Yates novel except with lizardman sex.'***** 'One of the best tongue-in-cheek social satires that I've ever read. It delves into gender politics. It takes a long, hard look at mental health. It addresses female sexual freedom and agency. It asks the reader to examine what it means to be human ... Genius.'***** 'Really brilliant: a deconstruction of suburbia by way of monster movies that examines sad realities with hilarious verve ... Sometimes you need a sexy frog person to break you out of the ties that bind. '***** 'Hooked me so deeply I picked it up and finished it the same night ... Beautiful ... Will stay with me.'***** 'What the hell just happened?'*****

Mrs Caliban

Lucía RG

I was kindly sent this in exchange for an honest review via Netgalley

I didn't know the woman would end up having sex with the frog-man and that is all on me because once again I didn't read the full synopsis and just thought the man and the woman would have a conversation in her kitchen.
I liked the language and I think the premise is interesting but I find its contents deeply disturbing. I enjoyed the parts where the monster was not involved. The characters were not really likable and they were kind of irritating, and it ended up taking longer than necessary to read. 
I really enjoyed the surrealist feelings from the beginning, and not knowing if what she was hearing on the radio was real or not, but the middle part and coexisting with the monster felt tedious

Moray Lyle McIntosh

A fascinating story of a lonely housewife ground down by a failing marriage and a terrible loss. Dorothy starts to hear voices through the radio but strange story of an amphibian creature escaped from a nearby research lab is all too real, and he turns up at her door for looking for food. Dorothy takes him in, this 8ft frog-man and names him Larry. Larry has suffered terribly in captivity, ensuring cruel experiments and torture by scientists who see him as a monster and am animal and as he and Dorothy begin to communicate they help to heal reach others wounds. Their relationship is powerful but so ordinary that it is sometimes possible to forget that Larry isn't human, and that's the point as Ingalls invites us to consider what human means beyond a scientific designation and what humanity is. There's a dark streak to the tale that helps to ground it in reality despite its surrealism. What makes it so special is it's subtlety. Ingalls' spare, deceptively simple writing is a brilliant juxtaposition to the outlandish plot and the surprisingly high body-count. There are lots of familiar theme, suburban boredom, female identity linked to home and husband, even monster movies but Ingalls gets to the heart of all of them as her two very different characters realise they are not do different after all and consider the world together. It's a little gem of a book.

Michael Chen

Roger Amundsen

carissa r

Yasmin

camille peiffer

Will Vunderink

Kyle Curry

Kaycee

Dorothy se languit. D'action, d'amour, d'enfants. Jusqu'à ce qu'une gigantesque créature débarque chez elle. Une créature qui dit s'appeler Larry et avoir besoin d'aide. Une créature qui va bouleverser son existence... Parue en 1982 aux Etats-Unis et encore inédite en français, une fable saisissante d'imagination, comparée par les critiques aussi bien à King Kong, à La Belle et la Bête, au Magicien d'Oz, qu'aux récits d'Edgar Allan Poe, aux contes de fées d'Angela Carter ou encore aux oeuvres hallucinées de David Lynch. Inspirée par la deuxième vague féministe, Rachel Ingalls brosse le portrait d'une jeune femme qui se libère d'un quotidien monotone et castrateur, se découvre, émotionnellement, sexuellement, et existe enfin. Une pépite Vintage à redécouvrir au plus vite !

Shreya Punj

Em💫

A bored, lonely married woman, Dorothy Caliban, encounters Larry, a gigantic frog-like creature recently escaped from a sadistic laboratory, and they become intimate friends, in a tale of sex, horror, fantasy, and violence

Mrs. Caliban

Reviews

Highlights