Caliban to King Kong, Edgar Allan Poe’s stories, the films of David Lynch, Beauty and the Beast, The Wizard of Oz, E.T., B-horror movies, and the fairy tales of Angela Carterhow such a short novel could contain all of these disparate elements is a testament to its startling and singular charm. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at . Reviewers have compared Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. No Love Lost by Rachel Ingalls is published by Faber (£9.99). One story ends with people destroying “the world which, until just a few moments before, had been theirs” – but from such destruction Ingalls confects delicious creations. Elsewhere, the blackness of Ingalls’s vision is offset by brutal comedy, whether through rains of toads ( Friends in the Country) or in her pitch-perfect ear for an ending, which never fails her. An exception is the title story, an uncharacteristically dense and sombre tale of a family struggling in the aftermath of war. Most of the stories are pacy and dialogue-heavy, so they slip down nicely just before a horrifying revelation makes them catch in your throat. At least half the pieces here are as satisfying as Ingalls’s masterpiece Mrs Caliban, which in 1986 was named one of the 20 outstanding postwar US novels by the British Book Marketing Council, alongside the likes of Humboldt’s Gift, Invisible Man and Song of Solomon. Ingalls had a prescient eye for subject matter: In the Act features a sex robot coming between a husband and wife (battling couples are fertile territory here) decades before Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. The blackness of Ingalls’s vision is offset by brutal comedy and her pitch-perfect ear for an ending
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