Of all the attempts to summarize Halifax author Elliott Gish’s debut novel, Grey Dog, about schoolmarm Ada Byrd’s unravelling in quiet Lowry Bridge, Canadian novelist Suzette Mayr’s words stick most in the mind. In her review of Gish’s story—a psychological horror that reads as if the Brontë sisters took a page from Stephen King—the Giller Prize-winning author calls it a “slow burn” that “unfolds so smoothly and subtly that you don’t realize until it’s far too late that all the walls are on fire and the story has its hands wrapped around your throat.”
Indeed.
Gish’s fiction debut (out Apr. 9 through ECW Press) is like a simmering pot or a mind fraying at the edges: What starts seemingly small can balloon quickly. And within the Halifax librarian’s Grey Dog is a story that is both a feat as well as a literary treat: A tale that can pull you along through its prose while something deep and harrowing builds, waiting for its reveal.
The setting is 1901. Byrd, a single woman approaching her thirties, is on the move to a new teaching post at a school in the woods. She boards a train, ready to leave her past—and her secrets—behind. But before long, unexplainable events start to occur: Swarms of dying crickets. Grotesque animals. A voice calling to her from the shadows. (“It happened again. God help me, it happened again,” Byrd writes in her journal one day.)
In Grey Dog, Gish weaves a story of traumatic memory, of women’s suppression and the things that linger at the margins of our subconscious. The Coast spoke with her ahead of her book’s release.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
TC: It’s an exciting time for you: The novel’s debut is almost here, and you’ve got a book launch at the Halifax Public Library on Saturday. What emotions are you feeling right now?
EG: Like it’s not quite real. I do keep thinking that I’m going to wake up at some point in time, and it’s going to be right back at the beginning of when I was first drafting the book—like this is all just some protracted daydream or something like that. But it’s also been a surprisingly easy process—as easy as publishing a book can be. Mind, I don’t have anything to compare it to.
When did the seed of Grey Dog take root for you?
I was reading a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, and that led to me exploring her letters and her journals a little bit more. I was a huge fan of Montgomery when I was a child—Anne of Green Gables, of course, but also the Emily Starr books. And she has a reputation of writing fiction that’s very frothy and very light and very wholesome—which isn’t always an earned reputation, like, a lot of her fiction does get quite dark. But the comparison between that reputation and the life that she actually led, which was full of crises of faith, a very difficult marriage, and drug addiction, and issues with their children, and looking at the way that she had this reputation of, you know, being just a sweet schoolmarm who wrote a book, but then reading her journals where she complains constantly about having to be a schoolteacher and how much she hates it.
I found that really, really interesting. Just because it’s so significant to the difference between what was expected of women of her time—the public face that women were expected to put forth—and their actual inner lives. And that made me think, ‘What if I had that sort of late-Victorian, early-Edwardian archetype of the spinster schoolmarm and really explored those feelings of what it’s like to be somebody who was almost left behind by a society that doesn’t really appreciate anything that a single woman has to offer? How badly would that mess with your head?’
“What if I … really explored those feelings of what it’s like to be somebody who was almost left behind by a society that doesn’t really appreciate anything that a single woman has to offer? How badly would that mess with your head?”
You’ve written a horror novel—not a slasher horror, but a psychological one instead. One of the things that struck me about Grey Dog is this notion of the past as a living thing: You can change your surroundings, or think you’ve left your past behind, but it catches up with you.
Absolutely. And I think Ada does think, initially, that just making that change of scenery is going to be enough to fix everything that’s gone wrong in her life. But of course, the situations that we’ve been in, the memories that we hold of them, the way that we’ve messed up our lives, or the way that our lives have been messed up for us by circumstance… those always follow us, right? Like, people who think that going on a vacation is going to be enough to fix their life—even when you’re on vacation, you’re going to have those 3:00 am thoughts of, ‘Remember when I did this terrible thing?’ or ‘Remember when I messed this up?’ or ‘Remember when I said that weird thing in fourth grade and everybody laughed at me?’ Your memories never leave you.
One thing that makes Grey Dog distinct is its perspective: The story unfolds entirely through Ada’s journal entries. What were the challenges involved in writing horror in a diary format?
It was both a challenge and an opportunity. I really love putting those [creative] limits on myself—and having this strict format was really useful, because for one, it kept me in Ada’s head the whole time. And that made it even more fun to grapple with [an] unreliable narrator. When you only see the world through Ada’s eyes, we get no objectivity, which means that it’s even more up in the air as to whether or not what is happening is actually happening, or if it’s just her imagination.
It also gave me a chance to explore a literary format that was really championed by women of her time period. A lot of women kept journals and diaries all the time—which was very much sort of pooh-poohed as [not being] a serious literary endeavor at the time. Like, women all over the world were keeping diaries, very detailed diaries in some cases, but they weren’t really considered literature. And so you had this very socially acceptable way for women to express themselves and their feelings—through the written word—in a way that was acceptable precisely because it wasn’t taken very seriously.
How did Ada come to your mind as a character, and how did she change as you wrote her story? In what ways did she take on a life of her own that might have differed from what you’d imagined?
She definitely revealed herself to me through the writing. And I think the diary format was really helpful in that sense, because I could never step back and get out of her head. I was forced to spend the entire length of the book just exploring who this person was and figuring out what made her tick—all these little idiosyncrasies she has, where she’s very prim and very prudish in many ways, but then she’ll reminisce about the beautiful rabbit corpse that she and her sister found in the field. Those sorts of contradictions were really lovely to explore—and you get a lot of room to do that in a diary format. You [have] space to go off on digressions and tangents, which is amazing. That’s 90% of how I write.
As to how she changed, I think when I started the book, I imagined her as being a lot more timid than she ended up being. I imagined her as very mousy and very afraid of her surroundings—and of course, she does start that way. She’s very afraid of the things that she’s experiencing. But as she moves through the book, she definitely experiences a sort of liberation and gets much bolder—and that was not something I expected.
Elliott Gish will read from Grey Dog and discuss the book with author Tiffany Morris (Green Fuse Burning) at the Halifax Central Library on Saturday, Apr. 13 at 2pm.
Related Stories
12 books by Halifax authors for your end-of-2024 reading list
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2024.
You missed Stories of Scotland at Bus Stop Theatre on May 16