Grey Dog
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3.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
“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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gish's seething, gorgeous horror debut centers on 29-year-old schoolteacher Ada Byrd, whose tarnished reputation—the cause of which is better left unspoiled—drives her in 1901 to relocate from the comparatively bustling town of Willoughby to the small hamlet of Lowry Bridge, hoping to rebuild her life. Almost as soon as she arrives in the claustrophobic small town, however, she's greeted by a series of odd and terrifying visions and dreams, including insect swarms and forest creatures giving horrific birth to human infants. Ada seeks answers from a mysterious widow shunned by many of the townsfolk, leading her down a path of both terror and self-discovery. Gish's prose is as sharp as a scalpel, giving readers a precise portrait of Ada's internal state as she grapples with the unique horrors of socially enforced womanhood at the turn of the century. In an impressive and effective touch, Gish never asks the reader to like complicated, prickly Ada even as she demands to be understood. The novel's diaristic format lends itself perfectly to the revelations that unfold, and the ending will haunt readers long after the final page is turned. Calling to mind the folk horror of T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones, this marks the arrival of a bold new voice.
