No Love Lost

Introduced by Patricia Lockwood: Gothic tales from the mistress of the weird behind frogman-romance Mrs Caliban for fans of Shirley Jackson, Lucia Berlin and Patricia Highsmith.

‘Wonderful.’ – Margaret Atwood
‘Genius.’ – Patricia Lockwood
‘Remarkable.’ – Joseph Heller
‘Perfect.’ – Max Porter
‘Immensely skillful’ – Ursula K. Le Guin
‘Tender, erotic, singular.’ – Carmen Maria Machado
‘Still outpaces, out-weirds, and out-romances anything today.’ – Marlon James
‘One of the greatest short story writers we have.’ – The Times
‘You are in masterly hands as Ingalls lures you into a swamp of violence and magic.’ – Sunday Times

After a one-night-stand with the Angel Gabriel, a monk is transformed into a pregnant woman. Lost in the fog, two visitors are lured into a ruined candlelit mansion. A wife confiscates her husband’s homemade sex doll, only to demand her own. Great-aunts warn of the deadly skin of the pearlkillers. Rachel Ingalls’ incomparable novellas are masterpieces: surrealist, subversive, tragicomic. Prepare to meet what lurks beneath.

‘Macabre, fantastic and haunting . . . One of the most brilliant practitioners of American Gothic since Poe . . . Read her at your peril.’ – Independent

‘Fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness . . . In her vision of intimacy and interdependence, you’re simply not safe until everybody else is dead . . . Brilliant.’ – New Yorker

‘Resists definition . . . Her work combines subtlety and horror, magic and stark realism, Greek tragedy and happily-ever-afters . . . Rare and fine. ‘ Guardian’Idiosyncratic, haunting, masterly . . . A modern fabulist making myths which explode into strangeness.’ – Observer