Grey Dog, Elliott Gish. ECW Press, 2024.
A “cozy mystery” is a gentle novel, one where the disturbances happen off the page, and the reader can process the attendant dramas or traumas alongside their new detective friend, generally in a comfortable small-town setting where everybody knows your name. In Grey Dog by Elliott Gish, the dial is cranked, melted: it’s a horror novel wearing a mystery’s trenchcoat, styled for a witch. Set in 1901, the new teacher in small-town Lowry Bridge is Ada Byrd, “nearly thirty with neither marriage nor children under her belt” (9), an amateur naturalist with a baby owl’s skull on her desk. Lucky to find a new posting after the trouble at her last job, Ada loves nature — when she and her sister Florrie were young, they believed in a “God of the outside.” Gish pays homage to Gothic fiction with Grey Dog’s small and grotesque horrors, using the intimacy and immediacy of Ada’s journals — “blots and slashes in the paper” (2) — to make the reading an unsettling and living experience.
Women are feared when they are smelly, naked, too close to nature, or alone, but what is fear, for a woman? As a teacher myself, this book held a lot of my fears. It is easy to not only worry, but become consumed, by the possibilities of loss of control, of failure to reach the most needed, of nature walks where children go missing — or suddenly appear. Lost children haunt this novel, as do the horrors of bringing a child into the world: “the wild indignities of coupling, the mess and the hurt, the grotesque shifting and swelling of her body as another formed inside of it . . . and then the gore of childbirth, tearing and stink, the rending of her body in two as something else forced its way out of it, just as something had forced its way into it nine months before” (281). Ada’s sister died in childbirth, and her homestay family lost their six-year-old in the snow. Even those women and children who are still in Lowry Bridge have something eerie about them: one girl is presented as “a woman sewn into the skin of a girl” (29) and she is seen kissing the knuckles of the spinster outcast (once teacher), who casually suggests, “I suppose you have heard that I am a witch” (96). In the illicit Wordsworth poetry book left behind by the previously disappeared teacher, Ada reads “No matter if I plug my ears it / still calls to me” (225). What is this “it” that might have taken her predecessor? Where do women go when they get lost? Will Ada, a competent and caring teacher, be able to make it here, or make it out?
Like the Romantic poets, who were themselves immersed in the Gothic tradition, it is toward nature that Ada is pulled, bringing her students outside to explore, and taking comfort in her daily walks to and from the schoolhouse. But it is also in the unknown forest where the horror begins to build. First swarmed by crickets, then given a bouquet of sewed flowers inside of which she finds an animal’s tail, Ada is pursued by little deaths and big voices. “I am not mad” (259), says Ada, but the horrors she witnesses disappear immediately; they are not observable to others. These persist until Ada begs them to come “inside with me. To see it before me, tangible and real, something I could put a shape and a name to, instead of the unseen fiend that knocks on doors and whispers my name” (256). The worst fear for a woman, it turns out, is to be strange even to herself.
Ada recalls how, when she and Florrie were young, “our attempt at creating a world for ourselves, separate from the one we shared with him, had infuriated” (118) their father. After her journal is found, Ada watches her homestay mother “thumb through the pages of my brain” (244). One expects, when reading a journal, to read of a life lived, but Ada’s journal is less of a log than it is a convincing tool, written for herself, the only one who both knows and can never know the whole truth. When Ada first left home, where she had been beaten as a child, and later hidden after a forced pregnancy and stillbirth, she resolves to send her parents “the daily minutiae of a spinster’s life in the middle of nowhere. Cheerful, dishonest letters, quite free of emotion and depth. My truth shall remain trapped on its pages, while my happy little lies travel the world”.(4) Through the use of the journal form, Elliott Gish wraps the reader up in the cloak of Ada’s confusion and cover-ups; as witness and victim, we get to read Ada’s diaries through both eyes. While a more disorienting experience — a step deeper into the darkest woods — could be available to Gish by breaking from the linear, day-by-day form of the diary, the well-lit path she threads keeps momentum for readers seeking greater clarity. With Gish’s offerings of Ada’s interior, I never felt like I was in a paint-by-numbers scene; maybe more of a soft-core haunted house: a cozy mystery’s goth cousin.
The intentional ambiguity of Ada’s journal can be read at the level of one key word: Ada often uses the term “queer” in its original definition to represent oddness — and its frequent appearance serves as a wink to the reader, whom Gish is undoubtedly aware will read into the term all its associations and meanings. The feelings Ada had for the woman she lived with at her old posting, and now for Agatha, the reverend’s wife, are not chaste — they include involuntary licks and bites. “I’ve felt queer ever since it happened,” Ada tells Agatha, who replies: “I have felt queer for months now” (271). Even in her own journals, Ada fails to properly see her experience because it must appear to her gruesome, unnatural, and disappeared. Gish is a careful horror writer who knows, above all, how her work will be read. By trapping Ada in her own experience, and in a time and place that is itself horror, a key word allows the reader to make parallels to the present while remaining immersed in the past. Ada knows “there is a kind of logic behind the movements of all wild creatures,” that “nothing occurs in the natural world that cannot be understood through patient observation.” (112) We are gifted with the fact that Elliott Gish too sees the logic and humanity of her character’s experience, permitting us all at once to become lost and found within the bounds of our own horrors.
— Véronique Darwin is a fiction writer and theatre creator living in the mountains of Rossland, BC.
