"There's a unicorn in the garden, eating the lilies." I feel, without ground probably, that this is a staple of Thurber's absurdity.

Stephen Vincent Benet's "The King of the Cats" may be an example of the type.

(It's a fantasy trope, isn't it? The Dragon Griaule is an example of this, and Towing Jehovah, on the monstrous side.)

I didn't much like the novel, but the premise of Lauren Groff's The Monsters of Templeton was that an immense dead sea monster washed ashore in a sleepy New England town.

Wells's In the Days of the Comet uses this device for much of the novel - but the comet does eventually arrive.

The Enormous Radio by Cheever.

John Chu's "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere" comes to mind.

Can't think of stories but lots of scenes from novels; the tractor in the early chapters of "The Grapes of Wrath", the rubber horse in the swimming pool in "The Day of the Locust", The Airborne Toxic Event in "White Noise"

Yes, you're right. I'm staring at the collected stories of Malamud and Bashevis Singer, thinking there must be one inside that fits your description.

For ones where it's an inexplicable character there's The Doubtful Guest, which must have been inspired by Sorrows of a Paterfamilias. A lot of other Kafka stories are close, like The Metamorphosis, Jackals and Arabs, Hunter Gracchus, and whichever story has the creature in the synagogue.

Calvino's three Our Ancestors narratives mostly fit that template: Baron in the Trees, Nonexistent Knoght, Cloven Viscount. Smog and The Argentine Ant are about people needing to make environmental adjustments, but both are plausible. Some Cosmicomics tales involve sudden encroachments of a disturbing rather than threatening nature, e.g. The Daughters of the Moon.

And that science-ish essayist popular in the '70s, something Lewis or Lewis something, had a story about mutant fish in a city that everyone quickly got used to.

I forget how the populace reacts to discovering Uqbar in Borges' stories, other than being gradually contaminated by its ideas and impossibilities. Which is a kind of acceptance, I guess.

The Woody Allen segment of New York Cities involves a giant woman in the sky that everyone comes to take for granted.

Yes! That guy.

How'd I forget such a Welsh-bomb of a name?

A great book (now dated no doubt) but can't say I perceive the relevance.

You weren't unclear. But direct examples seem just past the tip of my mental tongue.

Woman in the Dunes? Hmm.

Can't remember if part of the point of The Exterminating Angel was that the horrible upper middle class people complained about their magical imprisonment but didn't have much curiosity about it. Or if they instead did and it was more about just deserts.

Like Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged...

The inability to leave the church in Buñuel's El Angel Exterminador.
It is not material though.

Pardon one more unhelpful memory fragment, but I recall a story in which some gargantuan insect-thing lands on Earth, its legs mostly in the Pacific Ocean. Earthquakes, tsunamis, the mayhem you'd expect then ensue. Later, it leaves. No idea where I read it.

Barthelme's "The Balloon"?

- matthew davis

"The Drowned Giant" by Ballard is a little bit like this. Additionally I think this characterizes a lot of Etgar Keret's stories, and a few of Ian Watson's as well (for instance, "My Soul Swims in a Goldfish Bowl").

This isn't a thing, but maybe it qualifies: Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery"

This is Dawgzy. R. Crumb's "Meatball"

James Thurber actually, for giant beings in the bedroom, living room and courtroom which in the cartoons may need explaining but never are - kangaroos, rhinoceri, giant puppies. And, to be fair, The Metamorphosis cockroach does at the end occupy the space you describe even though as a son and brother, his changing condition was recognized. For a time.

In stories about elephants in the room, there is no thought that we should be sorry for them. Large, unavoidable, disliked, fading into wallpaper or sky, they are never seen as beings because their scale is not fathomable. If the Triffids of post-war Britain had stood still longer, we would have seen them as communication pylons and they could found a better moment.

Anne

J.G. Ballard's "The Watch-Towers" is a variant on this theme--it begins well after the inexplicable thing has (things have) appeared. It's one of his most enigmatic stories.


John Boston

Shaun Tan's "The Lost Thing" http://www.shauntan.net/books/lost-thing.html Kind of giant tea-pot :)

The inserted object onto the scene that is either sanctioned or rejected. It takes what it needs from its spectators or participants in order to reach maximum expression.

The mysterious object in the sky seen by the children at the beginning of Murakami's Kafka on the Shore. Never mentioned again.

1. The "four years, eleven months, and two days"-long rain in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

2. The book with an infinite pages in Borges's The Book of Sand.

3. The "stepper" (an inexplicably simple device that helps people "step" from one Universe to another), or for that matter, the "Long Earth" itself, in Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth.

4. Also, perhaps, the monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey?

"The Seraph and the Zambezi" by Muriel Spark

"The Drowned Giant", by J. G. Ballard.