mark reviewed The End of Tragedy by Rachel Ingalls
Four Arresting Novellas
4 stars
This is a collection of four novellas by Rachel Ingalls, whose "Mrs. Caliban" I had already read. These range from the opening "Friends in the Country," a kind of Roald Dahl (adult stories of Dahl, that is)-tinged visit to what may be a coven, to the doom-laden "The End of Tragedy." Ingalls' work, to me, specializes in stories about unhappy marriages that intersect with fantastical events and creatures, with elements we expect from B-movies and melodramas. I once read a piece about David Lynch that posited that we all think that Lynch's big thesis is that our idealized small-town Americana notions hide horrifying underbellies, but that his ACTUAL thesis is that nothing's hiding anything - the idealized small-town Americana and the seedy horror are not opposite sides of the same coin, they're the same side and they flow into one another. To my mind Ingalls is doing the same thing …
This is a collection of four novellas by Rachel Ingalls, whose "Mrs. Caliban" I had already read. These range from the opening "Friends in the Country," a kind of Roald Dahl (adult stories of Dahl, that is)-tinged visit to what may be a coven, to the doom-laden "The End of Tragedy." Ingalls' work, to me, specializes in stories about unhappy marriages that intersect with fantastical events and creatures, with elements we expect from B-movies and melodramas. I once read a piece about David Lynch that posited that we all think that Lynch's big thesis is that our idealized small-town Americana notions hide horrifying underbellies, but that his ACTUAL thesis is that nothing's hiding anything - the idealized small-town Americana and the seedy horror are not opposite sides of the same coin, they're the same side and they flow into one another. To my mind Ingalls is doing the same thing - many of her stories are about marriages that are terrible in a pedestrian way, and when the couple is confronted with something out of a b-movie or melodrama - a coven or a sex robot or a murder plot - the real horror is not the dramatic element, nor what the situation draws out of the couple, it's the marriage itself. One novella in the collection is not about that, not really - The Life of an Artist is about a pair of bohemian Finns who meet in Paris, their domestic lives and their struggles towards artistic success. It's very different from the other work of hers that I have read, and the most arresting novella in the volume.