Grey Dog Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD!
“Have you not guessed it yet? I am not a place where nature can be weeded and tamed and kept in order. I am tree roots— and dark hollows— and ancient moss— and the cry of owls. I am not a thing you can shape, not anymore. I am no garden, but the woods, and if you ever come near me again, every bit of wildness will rise up to bite you. I will tear your throat out with my teeth.”
Canadian speculative fiction writer Elliot Gish’s trot into horror, Grey Dog, sets her apart as a tension-building master with a bold voice and a lot to say. Gish’s wise pace and biting commentary exhilarate. Grey Dog follows 29 year old Ada Byrd, a school teacher, arriving to a new posting in a Canadian small town, where she dances between performing the role of a “good woman” in front of the God-fearing townsfolk and wrestling with her past full of mistakes, mistakes a woman in 1902 is not allowed to make. When she begins hearing a voice calling to her from the woods, seeing things that aren’t there, receiving terrifying omens of animal body parts, she can’t keep up appearances and as her mind turns on her so does the town. Will Ada find a way to turn it all around and be the ladylike school teacher the town wants her to be? The prim spinster? Or will she be wooed into the arms of the woods, disappeared like the town’s last school teacher? Ada’s journal documents a story full of queerness and crushes, unmet expectations, betrayals of friendship, miscarriages and lost children, the trials of teaching in Christian towns, and the tantalizing thrill of what you’ll find in the woods.
Although the novel’s concept— a haunting presence in the forest—isn’t uncommon in horror, Gish pours gasoline on the flame. After a number of frightening signs and sleepless nights, Ada slowly unfurls the mystery of what’s following her, all the while, slipping out of the “good woman” role, away from the judgment and resentment of the town, towards the deity that has chosen her. At first, Ada is blinded by fear, but the further away the town pushes her, the warmer the embrace of the woods. This is perhaps my favorite part of the novel. The delicious “spiral”. A spiral is what I call the latter point in a horror story where the main character loses touch with reality, but isn’t afraid; rather, they relish the spiral into madness. As the reader, I let go of the initial anxiety of Ada losing the few friends she made, losing her livelihood, losing her hygiene, losing her family— all of it. Instead, I picked up the author’s perspective: that all that loss is good. Freeing. The grey dog that haunts the woods is not your typical demon with malicious intent. The deity loves and wooes and lures and liberates.
From the book’s beginning, Ada worries about her future. As an unmarried, child-free woman of the era, she only has so many options to provide for herself. So she teaches school, not because she loves it but because it was the option given to her. As she rides into town before starting her new post, she wonders how many more first days she’ll have as a teacher before she is too old to teach. “And then… what?” That future, no matter how hard Ada tries to fit in with the townspeople, is uncertain. Her anxiety mounting amidst all the strange goings on, Ada starts to unravel and, I the reader, felt such heavy pressure for her to just be normal, it dominated the reading experience. But then the truth opened and I realized, alongside Ada, that our anxiety was unnecessary, for the grey dog offered her a new future. One filled with ecstasy. Away from the society that hates her.
“My choice. I imagined turning back, taking up an ordinary life as an ordinary woman. Choosing to live the rest of my days as a schoolteacher, a spinster with no prospects, sad and pitied failure of a woman. Impossible, I thought. Impossible. I cannot go back. I won’t.”
The only other path available would be to marry and have children, which Ada is not interested in. Throughout the story, she orbits reminders of a woman’s “true” role to reproduce, tied in many instances to men’s violence. When she visits the home of a problematic student, she converses with the girl’s elderly father, discovering the reason for the child’s scornful demeanor in her father’s gross ideology. “[Women] drop puppies, and then they die. You talk about natural history. What’s more natural than that?” He then makes her an indecent proposal: his wife died and he needs a new one, which she declines, then leaves. We learn that Ada once had a sister, Florrie, who died from her pregnancy. In the town, Ada meets the Reverend’s wife, Agatha, who she befriends, until Agatha spreads harmful information about her. Their falling out is explosive and even violent.
The one person in the whole town who seems to understand what is happening to Ada is an older widow, who the townsfolk hate. Some call her a witch. Others “queer”. During one of their conversations, the widow addresses this and says,
“Every town needs its witch, doesn’t it? Someone to whisper about in the dark.”
Ada likes her and reflects on why the rest of the town does not.
“Why is Mrs. Grier so set against Norah Kinsley? Is there bad blood between them? Or does she simply suffer from that most provincial of afflictions: fear of a woman alone.”
Slowly, Ada becomes what the town fears the most, “a veritable witch”, “a woman alone”, except she isn’t alone. The presence, the eyes from the woods, are always watching.
Ida’s past haunts her, too. This new position follows a placement that went horribly wrong and tarnished her reputation. This is her last chance. And now she’s hearing and seeing things. She fears most of all what will happen to her if people think her crazy.
“I know the conditions that await women in madhouses. I have read the horrific accounts of women with their hair shorn or sewn to their heads, plunging into freezing cold baths, tied to filthy beds and left to rot. That shall not be my fate. I will let the thing take me in its jaws first.”
Add on top of all that a deep, dark secret: being attracted to women. It’s a drought-ridden tree leaning over a bonfire. The terror grips Ada as well as us, the readers looking in. At any moment, disaster. Ruin. Even torture. And so when we learn of the grey dog’s adoration, suddenly, the relief of rain.
Gish’s exciting narrative will keep you eagerly reading and she rewards you for that the deeper you go. For fans of the A24 movie “The VVitch”, you’ll love this book.