Grey Dog
Coming April 2024
Ada, it says, that alien voice crooning my name like a lover. So gentle, so soft. Sweet girl. Beloved. Open the door. Let me in.
The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd- spinster, schoolteacher, amateur naturalist- finds herself disgraced and desperate after a series of personal tragedies. Hoping to re-establish herself as a respectable woman, she accepts a teaching post in the isolated town of Lowry Bridge, where nobody knows her secrets. There, she hopes, she can repair her reputation and her life in obscurity.
But Lowry Bridge has secrets of its own. There are voices calling from the woods, creatures hunting in the dark. Something ancient and nameless lives in Lowry Bridge, and it wants Ada. As nature claims her as its own and her grip on reality loosens, Ada becomes increasingly uncertain that she can escape what lives beneath the shadow of the trees… or that she wants to escape at all.
Coming in Spring 2024 from ECW Press, Grey Dog is the story of one woman’s shame, rage, and liberation at the dawn of the twentieth century.
What Some People Have to Say
“Gish’s prose is as sharp as a scalpel… this marks the arrival of a bold new voice.” – Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Elliott Gish has produced a ripe, exquisitely rendered gothic in which wilderness, both interior and natural, are dangerous, seductive, and bloody spaces. Ada Byrd is an iconic character, equal to Carmilla or Eleanor Vance.” – Kelly Link, author of White Cat, Black Dog
“Grey Dog is slow-burn horror story that unfolds so smoothly and subtly 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. In the tradition of the finest psychological horror novels, Grey Dog swallows the reader and adds its own special twist. Ada Byrd is destined to join that pantheon of protagonists who see-saw between being unreliable narrators or just unlucky enough to be living the unbelievable. A thrilling ride.” – Suzette Mayr, author of The Sleeping Car Porter
“Grey Dog is a bewitching tale of the horrors of spinsterhood in the early 1900s, with madness and magic threaded through every sentence. Elliott Gish transforms the multiple ways in which women were psychologically abused and viciously monitored into a gorgeous vision of folk horror, feral girl children, and wondrous monsters.” – Heather O’Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads
“Elliott Gish’s remarkable debut novel is a haunting historical gothic, exquisitely detailed and suffused with queer longing, violent trauma, and escalating dread. Through a succession of diary entries from the early twentieth century, Gish crafts a compelling and disquieting portrait of a repressed young teacher attempting to put her past behind her and start life anew in a distant country town. But her past won’t be so easily buried, and whatever is in the woods will not be denied. Set your first impressions aside: this is a work of overwhelming intensity that will take you in its teeth and shake you.” – David Demchuk, author of Red X