She wants her husband to drive her home, but he refuses, mystified at “how she could be so parochial as to leave just when Henry Kissinger was about to arrive: wasn’t she interested in world politics, in history?” In a 1992 novella, a creepily precocious little boy rings a doorbell and explains to the woman who answers that he’s actually a grown man trapped, “Freaky Friday” style, in the body of his own son despite his pleas and threats, she returns him to his dad, who soon asks for her hand in marriage and who, local gossip suggests, may have bumped off a previous wife. In one story, from 1987, a Biblical plague of toads emerges from a bathtub to beset a woman at the house of some sinister acquaintances. Dense with allusion and impervious to any consistent interpretation, her work often invites contradictory responses. Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness.

Now her one novel-length work, “ Binstead’s Safari,” published in 1983, is being reissued by New Directions. Caliban” a wild-card entry on a list of the twenty best postwar American novels back in 1986, but only recently has she gained a broader readership that she seems likely to keep. In a rare interview, she explained her resistance to publicity as a fear of “being set up as the new arrival in the zoo.” Attention flared when the British Book Marketing Council made “Mrs. Ingalls, whose works are frequently out of print, has been unjustly neglected, and she is also constitutionally self-effacing. Caliban,” about an affair between a housewife and a green-skinned sea dweller, was conspicuous for her absence. Those who flung (unsubstantiated) allegations of plagiarism at Guillermo del Toro’s 2017 film, “ The Shape of Water,” included the maker of a recent Dutch short, the son of the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paul Zindel, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who directed and co-wrote “ Delicatessen.” But Rachel Ingalls, the author of the 1982 novella “ Mrs.

It’s the kind of story-a collision of fairy tale, pulp, and the dredgings of the unconscious-that produces an eerie familiarity. A lonely woman romances a large aquatic creature who’s fleeing her town’s sadistic scientists.

Mrs caliban