The Brooklyn Rail

Elliott Gish’s Grey Dog is a haunting debut novel about a 1901 school teacher with a traumatic past. When Ada accepts an isolated post in the woods of Nova Scotia, she’s up against the censure of a conservative town. But what she finds in the woods—swarms of insects that attack then vanish, dead chickadees, a deer that births mangled flesh—convinces her there’s something ancient and powerful there: the grey dog. It calls her.

The book is literary horror that’s subversive, queer, and contains the full blast of female rage. I spoke with the writer about crafting a slow-burn sense of terror, the form and function of literary and historical diaries, and that burning rage.

Allison Wyss (Rail): Grey Dog opens with a reflective moment on a train, in which we learn about Ada’s past, before slowly approaching the horrors that await her. Why did you start the story this way? 

Elliott Gish: A scary story never really begins when the ghost shows up or the monster crawls out from under the bed. It’s seeded before that. Those moments of calm highlight the events that follow, not only because they provide contrast but because they give the reader a chance to settle in.

The train ride is not only useful from a story perspective, but it’s the first chance Ada has to draw breath herself. She left her previous teaching post in disgrace and spent months under the thumb of her father, who treats her like a child at best and a criminal at worst. She, like the reader, needs a chance to take a breath.

Rail: But there’s already this undercurrent—a stifled sense of rage.

Gish: I didn’t notice the book was so rageful until other people pointed it out. When I started, I thought Ada’s main emotions would be sorrow, obviously, because of her sister’s death and the things that happened to her, but also terror. But those feelings are a mask for the deeper emotion of unbridled anger that doesn’t have a specific target. It’s anger at the way her life has turned out, at the way she’s been restricted by her world, anger that she hasn’t done anything all that wrong, but is punished over and over by the people she knows, by the society she lives in. Everything about her is a mask she puts up to hide the rage she feels.

Rail: But the mask falls off. She has these bursts of emotion.

Gish: When I read it through the first time, all these moments popped out, when Ada has a reaction that seems out of left field. That’s the rage. It will find whatever moments it can, so she can vent a bit of steam. If it’s someone saying “ain’t” or a conflict with a student, she reacts with this disproportionate irritation or anger. She’s a prim and proper, late Victorian/early Edwardian woman, who is only allowed to be angry when people use incorrect grammar or when her students sass her. Those are her socially acceptable rage channels.

Rail: There’s this moment when she strikes a student:

Something caught me in its teeth then, a howling monster made of nothing but rage and vengeance. I crossed the room in two broad strides—I reached down to grab the girl by the shoulder and haul her up—and she twisted out of my grasp with a shout, her composure finally broken—and my other arm came down in a furious arc, lashing out toward her face. The sound the switch made as it struck her face was as loud, in that suddenly quiet room, as any gunshot.

Gish: It’s so mean. It’s so disproportionate. The girl didn’t do anything to necessitate that reaction. She’s just an irritating teenager. I was thinking this really should not be happening, but Ada took the reins on that one.

Rail: Ada’s other vent is her diary.

Gish: I knew it would act as a vent. There would be moments of pure fear and anger. But, Ada being who she is, they would be followed by a sort of rationalizing and coming down and moving on. That’s the only way you can keep going with a book like this. Otherwise, it’s just screaming: “The crickets are gone! They were here and they’re gone!”

It’s not until the end that those moments of processing stop. Ada can no longer explain anything to herself and also no longer wants to.

Rail: “No longer wants to” is important. There’s even a shift in her language that mimics the breakdown of her thoughts and emotions.

Gish: The diary format is a great way to remain inside a person’s head.

I also wanted to stay within the fear. A first person POV without the diary would have had a certain distance I didn’t want. I wanted that exact moment of space and time when things happen. Ada writes things as they happen to her, and she doesn’t know what will happen next.

It also makes Ada more unstable as a narrator. There’s nothing more subjective than a diary. Anyone who’s read their teenage diary will know that. “My mom sucks! Everyone hates me! I’m very smart!”

Rail: Ada absolutely transgresses. She breaks so many social norms—even into violence. Was she fun to write or terrifying?

Gish: She was both fun and terrifying! When I wrote about her becoming more and more erratic and volatile, I let myself be guided by my own worst instincts. What’s the meanest thing I could say to someone? What’s the worst way I could respond to a situation? What nasty little lizard-brain impulses do I swallow when someone is dull or self-righteous or irritating? I thought about what those knee-jerk reactions would be, and I gave them to Ada. It was exhilarating, but also led me to look askance at myself a few times!

I did wonder how far I could take her, and wonder, still, if the final scene will turn readers away from her altogether.

Rail: Do you want readers to turn away?

Gish: Yes and no. She’s doing stuff you shouldn’t do. It’s brutal and punishes someone who doesn’t deserve that punishment. But I had to remain true to the character. It’s more important to explore how Ada throws off her old life for a new and wilder one than to make sure she stays relatable. It’s not my job to make readers like what Ada does; it’s just my job to make sure they understand why she does it.

Rail: How realistic do you think Ada’s behavior really is?

Gish: We have a curious tendency to believe that before, say, the 1960s, women were prim and prudish and nothing else. Women of Ada’s time and class were, of course, supposed to act and speak and even think in a specific way. There were rules, very much determined by gender, and you were punished if you transgressed them. (Gender rules exist now as well, of course.) But there have been women behaving in all kinds of ways throughout history, both within the bounds imposed by gender and outside of those bounds.

Ada tries, at first, to work within them. She tries to be that respectable Victorian schoolmarm even though she finds it suffocating. Then, as she experiences stranger and stranger things, she slowly stops trying. The grey dog is a form of liberation. This mysterious thing in the woods, making her question her own sanity, is what enables her to step beyond those restrictions and into something new.

Rail: What if Ada weren’t of that time? What if she’d had social media instead of a diary?

Gish: She’d probably be a person who at 3 a.m. posts a selfie of herself crying then deletes it the next morning. It wouldn’t be a healthy outlet. It would give her trouble masking her feelings.

But setting the story in this time is helpful in the sense of isolation, not only personal but geographic. She’s in a small town in the middle of nowhere, physically stuck there. In a horror story like this one, there has to be a reason a person can’t leave.

Rail: What if Ada weren’t so isolated? Would community have saved her?

Gish: It might have saved her. But toward the end, she doesn’t want to be saved. Initially, she sees the Grey Dog as something harmful and hunting her, but by the end, she’s intrigued and curious.

Rail: We’ve talked about how the diary form keeps us in Ada’s head. Yet sometimes the story almost bypasses Ada’s comprehension. 

I could feel her pulse beating, as though my mouth touched not her lips, but the paper-thin skin over her wrist. A strange tide rose within me, stirring the currents of my blood. It made me gasp, and my mouth opened under hers, blooming like a wet rose. My tongue extended past the edge of my lips, seeking.

The sexual attraction is so viscerally located in the body that Ada doesn’t need to explain it to the reader. Is she even able to explain it?

Gish: Ada struggles with being honest, even in the privacy of her diary. She lies to herself. Her body, by contrast, is always honest. It trembles, it vomits, it licks and bites and lusts, and there’s a truth there that she eventually has to face. Even the way her body reacts to heterosexual sex and pregnancy is indicative of a truth for which she doesn’t yet have words: that this is not something she wants.

Speaking from my own experience, I remember feeling attracted to other girls before I knew what attraction was. Crushes were things you were supposed to have on boys, so I didn’t think of what I was feeling in those terms, but I remember being five years old, looking at a girl on the playground, and feeling my stomach flutter. I had no name for what I was experiencing, but my body knew.

Ada is in that space. Her body knows what it wants, but she does not, because no one has given her the words yet. Her experiences in Lowry Bridge force her to understand the world in a more immediate and animalistic way. Animals, after all, are great at listening to their bodies! The more she embraces the wildness inside her, the more she’s able to embrace her body and what it’s telling her about herself.

Rail: Grey Dog’s horror is located in the body, too, first. One way is through pregnancy. Ada watches a very upsetting animal birth, and human childbirth is remembered and discussed in terms of its gore and violence.

Gish: There’s a lot of cultural space given to childbirth as a wonderful, almost magical thing. It is that, but it’s also painful and messy and even traumatic for people who give birth, and there’s so little space for that held anywhere. You can talk about that beautiful moment of connection when you first hold your baby, but don’t you dare talk about losing teeth or bladder control! It does everyone a disservice to talk about the magic and not the mess. To fully appreciate the power of that act of creation, you need to appreciate how bloody and uncomfortable the whole process is. It takes a lot out of a body to make another human being. This is especially important now, when reproductive rights are being rolled back all over the place. No one should have to go through that if they don’t want to.

Rail: The book goes gory in a different way at the end. Ada so fully embraces the grey dog that she gnaws on a person. It makes me think about a story you published about a fisherman eating his daughter. Also, in Grey Dog we have more metaphoric passages:

I do not believe that my sister fell down that staircase. I believe, and always will, that she was pushed. Her husband, that Bluebeard, sucked the marrow from her bones before tossing them aside. She was eaten, then belched.

Is the cannibalism important to you for the metaphor or for its grizzly horror?

Gish: Cannibalism interests me primarily as a metaphor—we’re all consumed by the people we meet, by the world around us, by our children, by capitalism, by monotony or dread or trauma or hate.

A woman, specifically, is to be a sort of consumable product. We’re meant to make ourselves sweet and palatable, pushed to see ourselves as objects instead of subjects, encouraged to take on the role of nourisher. Womanhood and food are twinned, everywhere, all the time. So twinning womanhood and consumption makes sense to me.

Metaphor aside, cannibalism has a unique horror. We like to think we’re not animals the way other creatures are—that we’re people and could never be meat. Cannibalism complicates that line of thinking so we really cannot deal with it. But we keep coming back to it, analyzing it, putting it in movies and books and prestige television shows about high school soccer players. We can’t let ourselves think about it, and we can’t look away. It’s a contradiction. I love those!

Rail: I’d like to ask more broadly about the tradition of using horror to explore queer themes. How does Ada’s attraction to women play with her pull to the Grey Dog? I love that Ada has the freedom to get dirty and wild and do horrific things. Another writer might think, “Oh no, if I let her do anything truly bad, it will mean her other impulses are shameful too.” But it’s more complicated than that—messier and more alive.

Gish: While writing the book, I worried about what people would take away from Ada’s sexuality being so entwined with her escalating behavior and unsettled mind. I think all queer writers worry about this, because there’s such an awful history of lesbianism in particular being used as a literary shorthand for mental illness, depravity, moral decay, and so on. I hoped, at first, to make the queer themes a little more subtextual to avoid that. I even tried to give Ada a male love interest, but it simply did not work. I would walk that love interest into a scene and Ada would not interact with him in a way that indicated any interest whatsoever. The gay stuff just kept coming through, even as I tried not to let it. At one point, I rather desperately asked my cohorts in the Writer’s Studio what I should do to “straighten out” the story, because I was so afraid of reinforcing that pervasive cultural narrative that to be anything other than heterosexual is to be inherently flawed.

To their eternal credit, my writer friends responded with kind bewilderment and told me not to straighten it out at all. None of them thought I should de-gay the story. They all wanted it to be gayer!

Ada coming to uncertain terms with her attraction to women throughout the story is, more than anything, a result of her throwing away her former life as a “good woman.” Ada doesn’t embrace her attraction to women because she’s losing her grip on her sanity. Rather, she does it because she’s learning how to want things, how to experience the world through her senses and not just her mind. The grey dog is not a creature that understands shame—it’s too old and too wild for that—and Ada’s connection to it allows her to gradually release the shame and self-loathing that have kept her pent up and frustrated for most of her life.

Rail: The book ends when Ada tosses aside her diary, right before she runs into the woods. So we don’t get to know whether she meets a literal beast. And throughout, the book plays skillfully with a common horror trope, by making the character (and the reader) uncertain about whether Grey Dog is real or simply Ada’s brain, misfiring. Which is more terrifying for Ada?

Gish: Ada is far more terrified that it might be all in her head. This time was not kind to anyone suffering from mental illness (what time is?), so she would have a particular horror of being perceived to experience delusions. Fear is what motivates her to believe that the Grey Dog is real. If it’s real, she isn’t mad, and it’s very important to her that she isn’t mad.

Rail: Do you want the reader to be uncertain if Grey Dog is real?

Gish: I would like the reader to walk away uncertain, but almost everyone who has read the book has come down on one side or the other, and I haven’t dissuaded anybody from either. In the end, it doesn’t really matter if what is happening is real or not. It’s real to Ada, and we’re in her head the whole time.