No Love Lost — macabre menace, unexpected humour

Rachel Ingalls was relatively unknown when her work was first published. Born in Boston during the second world war, she studied in Massachusetts before moving to the UK, where she lived from 1965 until her death four years ago. This is Ingalls’ 12th collection after a career spanning some 40 years; her best-known work, Mrs Caliban (1982), became something of a cult classic and recounts a woman’s affair with an amphibious man-frog.

Ingalls herself acknowledged the reason for an initially limited readership: her medium — the short story or novella — is challenging to sell in the world of publishing. But recent interest has seen the release of No Love Lost: Selected Novellas.

A macabre atmosphere haunts these ‘long short’ stories reminiscent of Shirley Jackson or Patricia Highsmith

A macabre atmosphere haunts these “long short” stories: a sense of menace combined with a humour reminiscent of Shirley Jackson or Patricia Highsmith. “Blessed Art Thou” is the first in the collection and a reminder that you should expect the unexpected in Ingalls’ work. When a priest relates a visit from the Angel Gabriel, his fellow Brothers are sceptical until he reveals he is pregnant. “Oh, Christ,” says the man in charge, “Years clawing my way up the ladder, being polite to creeps and crazies . . . And now this happens.” His solution is denial and exile, ironically attempting to protect the organised religion whose origin is being re-enacted. Denial occurs too in “Something to Write Home About”, as John tries to ignore the signs of mental illness that his wife Amy exhibits on their holiday. As he notices others’ reactions to Amy’s behaviour, “He felt like a man in a cartoon, his head turned away while his dog strains on the leash to get at a lamp post.”

Many of these vignettes feature extraordinary situations where ownership — of possessions, people, sanity — emerges as a preoccupation. “Inheritance” introduces a comically witchy Shakespearean-style trio of long-lost German great-aunts who beg Carla to seek out an apparently stolen family heirloom referred to only as “the Treasure”, until its final, grisly revelation.

Ingalls’ award-winning debut novella Theft is included here, and involves a series of conversations between inmates in prison. Seth and Jake, a pair of black brothers-in-law arrested for stealing, are joined by rioters in what appear to be anti-colonial protests. Their enforced time together triggers discussions on possessiveness and jealousy.

All the stories were published between the 1970s and ’80s, bar the titular tale (2000). “No Love Lost” is the collection’s finale, a portrait of a family returning to their war-torn neighbourhood. The tale is unforgiving in its imagery, from the refugees “in a procession that looked like a picture of the damned let out of Hell” to what sounds like a dog barking in the distant quarry, where unwanted humans are discarded like rubbish. It is everyone for themselves, all desperate to provide for fractured families in a world that was “smashed to pieces”.

“No Love Lost” was likely inspired by the aftermath of the Balkan wars, and captures the desperation to cling to old ways of life in the face of inhumanity. As some semblance of normality returns, the protagonist sits on a fairground ghost train, marvelling at society’s willingness to enter a space of “cackling monsters, witches, cauldrons of boiling oil” when, so recently, their reality was more unfeeling and frightening than anything a ride could conjure up.

No Love Lost: Selected Novellas by Rachel Ingalls, Faber £9.99, 496 pages

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