Grey Dog

"Gish's prose is as sharp as a scalpel." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Grey Dog is a bewitching tale of the horrors of spinsterhood in the early 1900s, with madness and magic threaded through every sentence." -- Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads and Lullabies for Little Criminals

A subversive literary horror novel that disrupts the tropes of women's historical fiction with delusions, wild beasts, and the uncontainable power of female rage

The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd -- spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist -- accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past -- riddled with grief and shame -- has never seemed so far away.

But then, Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. She soon believes that something old and beastly -- which she calls Grey Dog -- is behind these visceral offerings, which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory loosens, and Ada takes on the wildness of the woods, behaving erratically and pushing her newfound friends away. In the end, she is left with one question: What is the real horror? The Grey Dog, the uncontainable power of female rage, or Ada herself?

Author: Elliott Gish
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 04/09/2024
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.03lbs
Size: 8.43h x 5.57w x 0.93d
ISBN: 9781770417328


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 01/22/2024
Foreword 02/13/2024
Booklist 03/01/2024 pg. 34

About the Author

Elliott Gish is a writer and librarian from Halifax, where she lives with her partner. A graduate of Simon Fraser University's Writer's Studio, Gish's fiction has appeared in many journals, including the New Quarterly, the Baltimore Review, and the Dalhousie Review, and was nominated for a 2022 Pushcart Prize.