A lonely woman romances a large aquatic creature who’s fleeing her town’s sadistic scientists. It’s the kind of story—a collision of fairy tale, pulp, and the dredgings of the unconscious—that produces an eerie familiarity. 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. Caliban,” about an affair between a housewife and a green-skinned sea dweller, was conspicuous for her absence. She often is. Ingalls, whose works are frequently out of print, has been unjustly neglected, and she is also constitutionally self-effacing. 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. 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. Now her one novel-length work, “Binstead’s Safari,” published in 1983, is being reissued by New Directions.

Ingalls writes fables whose unadorned sentences belie their irreducible strangeness. Dense with allusion and impervious to any consistent interpretation, her work often invites contradictory responses. 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. 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. We’re not sure whether the son has successfully usurped his father’s position and picked himself a mother to marry, or whether the woman has betrayed a frightened child, joining forces against him with the man who may destroy them both. In her grim yet playful fashion, Ingalls is concerned with the rules and conventions by which societies are organized, the violent machinations by which they are maintained. Like a good tragedian, she tends to heap up corpses at the end of her tales, and even in her quieter examinations of familial bonds she leaves readers to wonder, of her spouses and siblings, who might push whom off a cliff. In her vision of intimacy and interdependence, you’re simply not safe until everybody else is dead.

Ingalls’s work hybridizes classical literature and mid-century Americana. Born in 1940, she grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor of Sanskrit at Harvard and her mother kept house. As a child, she absorbed radio soaps and “Creature from the Black Lagoon” alongside Euripides and Shakespeare, playing the chorus in “Iphigenia in Aulis” in fourth grade. After graduating from Radcliffe, she spent the summer of 1964 in England, to see all the quadricentennial productions of Shakespeare that she could; the next year, she moved there permanently. Her début novella, “Theft,” appeared in 1970, and was followed by a cluster of other longish stories.

These stories, exploring the fatalistic territory that has held her interest ever since, often send Americans to a foreign land, where their ancient conflicts and compulsions show up in sharp relief. In “St. George and the Nightclub,” the middle-aged narrator, banished by his wife to a separate room in their hotel, looks back on “eleven years falling into the machinery and being caught in it with all the wheels going around and tearing you to pieces, and then one day instead of being rescued, the factory suddenly closes down. There you still are, caught in a monster machine, but all motion has gone out of it.” The disappointments of marriage are like those of life in general: you keep reproducing the horrors that have been visited on you until, with energies exhausted and conflicts unresolved, an arbitrary ending is imposed. “Theft” is a bleak parable about Seth, a starving family man who has been jailed for stealing a loaf of bread. It’s hard to tell when the story takes place: wealthy young radicals dragged into the nearby cells seem of the twentieth century—they cry, “Police brutality, imperialist pig”—but there are also hints of a retelling of the Passion of Christ. A climactic crucifixion scene contains an unexpected joke: as the Christ figure asks why he’s been forsaken, a prisoner on a nearby cross calls out, “God almighty, why can’t you pull yourself together and take it like a man?”

After publishing these first stories, Ingalls found herself stuck, as a writer, for most of a decade. But in her early forties she reëmerged, with a profusion of brilliant work. Her masterpiece, “Mrs. Caliban,” represents a leap marked by a delight in ambiguity, which extends here even to the title. Who, in this novella, is Caliban? Could it be Larry, the hairless, muscular, six-foot-seven, dark-green creature who has slain his tormentors at the Institute for Oceanographic Research and has turned up in the kitchen of the housewife, Dorothy, seeking shelter and offering sex, courteous companionship, and help with the housework? Larry could certainly be the persecuted other of post-colonial readings of “The Tempest.” (“I’ve figured out the make-up,” he tells Dorothy, after experimenting with disguises that might allow him to explore unmolested at night. “The secret is to wear a color that’s different from most of the people who live in the area.” Not surprisingly, this tactic doesn’t keep him safe for long.) Yet he ultimately seems more exiled duke than enslaved native. Perhaps the likelier candidate is Dorothy herself, marooned in her West Coast suburb, neglected by her philandering husband—they are, she tells her only friend, “too unhappy to get a divorce”—and numbed by the successive deaths of an infant son, an unborn child, and the family dog.

Housewife and beast are hard to separate—Dorothy’s name suggests exile from home (Kansas, Oz), and Larry may well be her own wishful creation, both erotic substitute and compensation for the children she’s lost. Mothering Larry, though, is no easy feat. She blows the household budget on vast quantities of avocados for him. (Larry, though a frequent killer of humans in self-defense, is a vegetarian.) And her efforts to elucidate society’s workings can bring her to the point of vertigo: