Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls

She came back into the kitchen fast, to make sure that she caught the toasting cheese in time. And she was halfway across the checked linoleum floor of her nice safe kitchen, when the screen door opened and a gigantic six-foot-seven-inch frog-like creature shouldered its way into the house and stood stock-still in front of her, crouching slightly, and staring straight at her face.

Dorothy is a housewife, the kind of housewife you read about in books. Her marriage to Fred has been a farce for years; they sleep in separate beds and are, as she tells her friend Estelle, too deeply unhappy to get a divorce. Fred clearly has a sidepiece, but who cares. Things look like they're going go on like that, forever, until a giant frog-faced monster shows up at her front door. His name is Larry, and he's escaped from a scientific facility, where he killed his captors to escape and is now on the lam. Dorothy hides him in her spare room (where Fred never even thinks to look) and soon Dorothy is in a full-flung sexual love affair with her amphibian lover.

It sounds so much like The Shape of Water I have to wonder whether the filmmakers were directly inspired by Ingalls' novel. But the flight to freedom that makes up the movie's climax isn't the kind of thing Mrs. Caliban is interested in (though it has its salacious and pulse-quickening moments). It's a domestic novel, a literally housebound novel: Dorothy lives her secret life with Larry while Fred is at work, though sometimes they go out driving at night, with Larry dressed up in a trenchcoat, hat, and gloves. Larry is a funny character, fluent in the English he learned at the lab--Larry is his own chosen name--but unfamiliar with the way that Dorothy's world works. His species approaches love and sex like most animals, without any special attachment to a single partner; there are no marriages, no childhood to speak of. As she teaches him the way of her world, she herself is, in a fashion, relearning it, reabsorbing youthful lessons about the possibility of real intimacy and family-making.

Unlike the fish-man in The Shape of Water, Larry seems to me essentially human. He's something like Mork from Mork and Mindy: a creature with a human's disposition but without knowledge or experience. Such characters bring perspective. And of course they are hated: the radio spreads panic and fear about Larry, with predictably violent results. Leave Larry alone! He just wants to eat avocados and have sex with his human mistress! In the end, of course, Larry and Dorothy cannot be together; the inescapable logic of bourgeois life arrives to smash their relationship. A surprisingly scandalous ending leads to violence and death, and though--spoiler alert--Dorothy is able to help Larry escape into the sea, the last image of the book is its most haunting: Dorothy coming back to the shore every day, hoping he'll return, which he never does.