Elliott Gish

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?

Grey Dog

Clara Gauthier

I want its flesh to merge with mine. I want it to engulf me, swallow me, obliterate me with its love. I want annihilation.

Stas

Since Florrie's leave-taking, there is no one with whom I may share my real feelings, no place in my life for candour and misery, save between the covers of this black book. My truth shall remain trapped on its pages, while my happy little lies travel the world.

rest in peace shauna shipman and lottie matthews you would have loved grey dog by elliott gosh. 

 it’s kinda like if cop car by mitski was a novel set in 1901

points off bc it’s a little slow to start, but u almost forget it’s a horror novel and then u slowly realize shit’s getting weird

rest in peace shauna shipman and lottie matthews you would have loved grey dog by elliott gosh. 

 it’s kinda like if cop car by mitski was a novel set in 1901

points off bc it’s a little slow to start, but u almost forget it’s a horror novel and then u slowly realize shit’s getting weird

something something you return to the earth for out of it you were taken and to the earth you shall return… or however genesis 3:19 goes. dust has always seemed to me too lofty a word choice, its imagery too sparse, for something god says to someone named after the literal earth. it isn’t just dust but the very soil that adam is made from and of, and it is back into the soil and dirt and mud most of us return, even now, upon death. 

it’s also soil that calls to the narrator of 

her affection for the natural sciences bordering in equal measure on both the morbid and fetishistic to the pure and religious. my attachment to ada was immediate from the first two chapters, and while the main pull of this book for me in the beginning was how refreshing i found its prose amidst my current roster of reads, it’s ada that i kept returning for, and her that i cared most about as her diary entries gradually revealed more about her life, and in the end her spiraling reality.

i think this intended to be a book about what that one 

’ essay on the monstrous feminine describes as:

for me, though, and probably indicative of my own fractured experience with what counts as womanhood, this was a novel of closed spaces: oppressive bedrooms where the unspeakable has occurred, cupboards into which children are shoved into as punishment, a casket with a loved one lost to a man who tore her apart, a school the size of only a single classroom, the physical and proverbial cage that is inescapable motherhood, a cluttered and neglected home where the sole daughter of a family with only men is forced to be servant, mother, and therefore no more than a disposable object. 

knows that. it makes the distinction early between the god of “inside”—the god of suffocating churches and rituals and laws that limit your agency, the god that lives in that cupboard, in that casket, in that school—and “the god of outside, the god that lives in the trees and in the dirt. and the insects, and the birds, and the things that eat them too.” the god of institution and the violent claustrophobia of being a woman, vs. the god that wants you wild and free and unequivocally yourself—the god, maybe, from which you came and to whom you shall return. 

ada had to make her choice between the two; i’m just not sure if one resolution of only the obvious two were all the choices a novel otherwise this well-written and well-structured could have managed with grace, especially with all the other wonderful variables it had in play. but maybe all this pales in the end next to the way desire slithers in and out of ada’s life as a force of its own. the perils of being the object of desire against your will, the perils of feeling desire for what cannot be yours, the all-consuming urgency of wanting to possess and be possessed even if it takes violence to satiate it, which in the end secures ada’s catharsis. 

i really liked this one, ultimately! the prose was well and truly prose-ing, the voice was voicing, and the vibe was vibing exactly as it should in the transition from end of summer to fall, where everything around me is wet and the ground is crawling with all the things i won’t see again until winter thaws. the one loose thread is that the diary format was no longer format-ing closer to the end (was she really sitting down in between all this and writing entries down? did the narration have to be her diary at all?) but that’s by no means a deal-breaker. the first 100 pages or so were something i had to sit down and savour slowly, but by the quarter mark i knew i had to do the remaining 300 in one sitting. i was so engrossed in those final chapters that i privately got annoyed at someone for intruding upon my immersion with the smell of the tangerine they opened next to me. that’s not something i often get to say about a book these days.

something something you return to the earth for out of it you were taken and to the earth you shall return… or however genesis 3:19 goes. dust has always seemed to me too lofty a word choice, its imagery too sparse, for something god says to someone named after the literal earth. it isn’t just dust but the very soil that adam is made from and of, and it is back into the soil and dirt and mud most of us return, even now, upon death. 

it’s also soil that calls to the narrator of grey dog, her affection for the natural sciences bordering in equal measure on both the morbid and fetishistic to the pure and religious. my attachment to ada was immediate from the first two chapters, and while the main pull of this book for me in the beginning was how refreshing i found its prose amidst my current roster of reads, it’s ada that i kept returning for, and her that i cared most about as her diary entries gradually revealed more about her life, and in the end her spiraling reality.

i think this intended to be a book about what that one hannah williams’ essay on the monstrous feminine describes as:

To be a woman is to be feared, to know fear, to hold the two simultaneously within yourself, to know that your body, by the sheer fact of its existence, will be terrified by the society that claims to be terrorised by it; that the patriarchy deems women’s bodies so awful, so monstrous, that it seeks to limit and control their power. These people  not only hate women, but are afraid of them; scared of the capacity for women’s bodies to be unruly, unclean, unknowable.

for me, though, and probably indicative of my own fractured experience with what counts as womanhood, this was a novel of closed spaces: oppressive bedrooms where the unspeakable has occurred, cupboards into which children are shoved into as punishment, a casket with a loved one lost to a man who tore her apart, a school the size of only a single classroom, the physical and proverbial cage that is inescapable motherhood, a cluttered and neglected home where the sole daughter of a family with only men is forced to be servant, mother, and therefore no more than a disposable object. 

but grey dog knows that. it makes the distinction early between the god of “inside”—the god of suffocating churches and rituals and laws that limit your agency, the god that lives in that cupboard, in that casket, in that school—and “the god of outside, the god that lives in the trees and in the dirt. and the insects, and the birds, and the things that eat them too.” the god of institution and the violent claustrophobia of being a woman, vs. the god that wants you wild and free and unequivocally yourself—the god, maybe, from which you came and to whom you shall return. 

ada had to make her choice between the two; i’m just not sure if one resolution of only the obvious two were all the choices a novel otherwise this well-written and well-structured could have managed with grace, especially with all the other wonderful variables it had in play. but maybe all this pales in the end next to the way desire slithers in and out of ada’s life as a force of its own. the perils of being the object of desire against your will, the perils of feeling desire for what cannot be yours, the all-consuming urgency of wanting to possess and be possessed even if it takes violence to satiate it, which in the end secures ada’s catharsis. 

i really liked this one, ultimately! the prose was well and truly prose-ing, the voice was voicing, and the vibe was vibing exactly as it should in the transition from end of summer to fall, where everything around me is wet and the ground is crawling with all the things i won’t see again until winter thaws. the one loose thread is that the diary format was no longer format-ing closer to the end (was she really sitting down in between all this and writing entries down? did the narration have to be her diary at all?) but that’s by no means a deal-breaker. the first 100 pages or so were something i had to sit down and savour slowly, but by the quarter mark i knew i had to do the remaining 300 in one sitting. i was so engrossed in those final chapters that i privately got annoyed at someone for intruding upon my immersion with the smell of the tangerine they opened next to me. that’s not something i often get to say about a book these days.

under its oh so gorgeous cover, grey dog hides an elegant mixture of historical gothic horror, religious guilt, female rage, lesbian longing, frustrations of a woman that can not and will not be 

 — that is, a humble, obedient, child-bearing, god-fearing slave stripped of everything that makes up a human being. while reading this, you will not be able to shake off the feeling of being watched, of shadows lurking just at the corner of your eye, of someone’s breath licking your neck, of something ancient calling your name from the woods. elliott gish has a rare ability to describe things so vividly to gift you such a delicious sensory experience — everything has a voice, a smell, a sensation that adds itself to the complex melody of the story. 

in grey dog, pregnancy is a disease, a body horror where a woman, or an animal, has to blur her form at the edges while a parasite feeds on her, growing inexorably. anywhere you go in lowry bridge, there is this apparition of silence pregnant with ancient terror. women are eaten so thoroughly even their bones are sucked dry, only to be belched after, and both the god of the inside and the god of the outside wouldn’t lift a finger to help ease their torture. maybe womanhood is having a vortex of silent, neglected pain in your belly and taking it everywhere with you. and sometimes there’s so much pain it turns into unladylike, animalistic hunger. and that is the element of the story introduced with the greatest precision. 

up to a certain point, it’s a highly promising read, until the narrative starts deteriorating, losing its previously steady step. as if it opened its jaws for a piece of meat too big. that’s why i find the ending a bit disappointing, because grey dog arouses a greater hunger than it is able to satiate. a fascinating read nevertheless. what wouldn’t one do to be called a perfect strawberry!

“one might say “a good man” and mean anything — there are as many ways of being a good man, it seems, as there are of being a man at all. but there is only one way to be a good woman. it is such a narrow, stunted, blighted way to be that i wonder any woman throughout history has been up to the task. perhaps none of us ever have.”

lily lily 

under its oh so gorgeous cover, grey dog hides an elegant mixture of historical gothic horror, religious guilt, female rage, lesbian longing, frustrations of a woman that can not and will not be a good woman — that is, a humble, obedient, child-bearing, god-fearing slave stripped of everything that makes up a human being. while reading this, you will not be able to shake off the feeling of being watched, of shadows lurking just at the corner of your eye, of someone’s breath licking your neck, of something ancient calling your name from the woods. elliott gish has a rare ability to describe things so vividly to gift you such a delicious sensory experience — everything has a voice, a smell, a sensation that adds itself to the complex melody of the story. 

in grey dog, pregnancy is a disease, a body horror where a woman, or an animal, has to blur her form at the edges while a parasite feeds on her, growing inexorably. anywhere you go in lowry bridge, there is this apparition of silence pregnant with ancient terror. women are eaten so thoroughly even their bones are sucked dry, only to be belched after, and both the god of the inside and the god of the outside wouldn’t lift a finger to help ease their torture. maybe womanhood is having a vortex of silent, neglected pain in your belly and taking it everywhere with you. and sometimes there’s so much pain it turns into unladylike, animalistic hunger. and that is the element of the story introduced with the greatest precision. 

up to a certain point, it’s a highly promising read, until the narrative starts deteriorating, losing its previously steady step. as if it opened its jaws for a piece of meat too big. that’s why i find the ending a bit disappointing, because grey dog arouses a greater hunger than it is able to satiate. a fascinating read nevertheless. what wouldn’t one do to be called a perfect strawberry!

“one might say “a good man” and mean anything — there are as many ways of being a good man, it seems, as there are of being a man at all. but there is only one way to be a good woman. it is such a narrow, stunted, blighted way to be that i wonder any woman throughout history has been up to the task. perhaps none of us ever have.”

In the novel, we follow Ada, an unmarried teacher, through her diary entries as she starts her new position at a school in a tight-knit rural community at the beginning of the 20th Century. Even though Ada‘s reeling from a recent loss and constantly struggling with her sexual identity, she’s so used to meet all the expectations her father, her students‘ parents and the villagers hold towards her, that the only whim she permits herself is to educate her students in natural history and the wonders the forest holds. But no matter how hard she tries, people will never be satisfied with her, and the more desperate she becomes, the more strange things happen, and the louder the forest calls for her…

This was a powerful read about the way women’s lives were and still are controlled by the men around them and what it means to break free from societal pressure and one’s own misguided expectations. It shows how women are not only victims, but also become their oppressors’ accessories in subjecting their peers to unrealistic standards - and are the first to scoff if they catch someone struggling. Ada‘s path is a hard one, and the reader can’t help but suffer with her. The use of horror elements in the tale is sparse, but effectively intensifies the slowly rising feelings of paranoia and isolation the protagonist has to deal with.

 Ada’s story is revealed piece by piece and nature uncovers more of its secrets, the narrative develops a pull you can no longer escape - and as the ending unfolds, the question lingers: What does it actually mean to be free?  And is it really worth paying the price?

I’m still thinking about this and am still at a loss for answers - definitely a mark of quality for good literature.

Nezumi

In the novel, we follow Ada, an unmarried teacher, through her diary entries as she starts her new position at a school in a tight-knit rural community at the beginning of the 20th Century. Even though Ada‘s reeling from a recent loss and constantly struggling with her sexual identity, she’s so used to meet all the expectations her father, her students‘ parents and the villagers hold towards her, that the only whim she permits herself is to educate her students in natural history and the wonders the forest holds. But no matter how hard she tries, people will never be satisfied with her, and the more desperate she becomes, the more strange things happen, and the louder the forest calls for her…

This was a powerful read about the way women’s lives were and still are controlled by the men around them and what it means to break free from societal pressure and one’s own misguided expectations. It shows how women are not only victims, but also become their oppressors’ accessories in subjecting their peers to unrealistic standards - and are the first to scoff if they catch someone struggling. Ada‘s path is a hard one, and the reader can’t help but suffer with her. The use of horror elements in the tale is sparse, but effectively intensifies the slowly rising feelings of paranoia and isolation the protagonist has to deal with.

As Ada’s story is revealed piece by piece and nature uncovers more of its secrets, the narrative develops a pull you can no longer escape - and as the ending unfolds, the question lingers: What does it actually mean to be free?  And is it really worth paying the price?

I’m still thinking about this and am still at a loss for answers - definitely a mark of quality for good literature.

Emily Perkovich

I absolutely adored this. It was like if Plath, Poe, Sarah Waters and Shirley Jackson had a little gothic hybrid baby. Despite this being historical it managed to feel contemporary and relevant without losing the firm setting. The body horror and gore were sprinkled in subtle amounts but still evocative when present, and there was a constant shadow of the fault in humanity and horrors of performative womanhood/femininity.

Thank you ECW and NetGalley for the ARC.

Grey Dog

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