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Grey Dog
"Gish's prose is as sharp as a scalpel." -- Publishers Weekly, starred review "Grey Dog is a bewitching tale of the horrors of spinsterhood in the early 1900s, with madness and magic threaded through every sentence." -- Heather O'Neill, author of When We Lost Our Heads and Lullabies for Little Criminals A subversive literary horror novel that disrupts the tropes of women's historical fiction with delusions, wild beasts, and the uncontainable power of female rage The year is 1901, and Ada Byrd -- spinster, schoolmarm, amateur naturalist -- accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge, grateful for the chance to re-establish herself where no one knows her secrets. She develops friendships with her neighbors, explores the woods with her students, and begins to see a future in this tiny farming community. Her past -- riddled with grief and shame -- has never seemed so far away. But then, Ada begins to witness strange and grisly phenomena: a swarm of dying crickets, a self-mutilating rabbit, a malformed faun. She soon believes that something old and beastly -- which she calls Grey Dog -- is behind these visceral offerings, which both beckon and repel her. As her confusion deepens, her grip on what is real, what is delusion, and what is traumatic memory loosens, and Ada takes on the wildness of the woods, behaving erratically and pushing her newfound friends away. In the end, she is left with one question: What is the real horror? The Grey Dog, the uncontainable power of female rage, or Ada herself?
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“Grey Dog” made for an intriguing read, albeit a mildly frustrating but interesting one. At its core, this is a horror story of feminine rage, with the latter being highlighted, and the horror seemingly left on the back-burner. A handful of scenes with surrealist elements makes not a horror story, so I was left a bit disappointed that the horror aspects weren’t leaned into as heavily. I’m not terribly sure that styling this story as journal entries was the most effective way to tell this story - rather than gaining deeper insight into the lead character Ada’s mindset, it read like a standard narrative that needed to be broken up somehow. This story easily could’ve been broken into three parts, each told with minor time jumps and would have worked much better than the journal entries. Though I had some problems with the novel, I still found it to be highly interesting, which made for a quick and entertaining read. I was unsure where the plot was going, which left a lot of room for guessing, resulting in a very fast-paced read, as I wanted to know what was going to happen next. For a debut novel, this certainly is far from horrible, I just wish there were some tweaks that would have made this story stand out and flow better.
“Grey Dog” made for an intriguing read, albeit a mildly frustrating but interesting one. At its core, this is a horror story of feminine rage, with the latter being highlighted, and the horror seemingly left on the back-burner. A handful of scenes with surrealist elements makes not a horror story, so I was left a bit disappointed that the horror aspects weren’t leaned into as heavily. I’m not terribly sure that styling this story as journal entries was the most effective way to tell this story - rather than gaining deeper insight into the lead character Ada’s mindset, it read like a standard narrative that needed to be broken up somehow. This story easily could’ve been broken into three parts, each told with minor time jumps and would have worked much better than the journal entries. Though I had some problems with the novel, I still found it to be highly interesting, which made for a quick and entertaining read. I was unsure where the plot was going, which left a lot of room for guessing, resulting in a very fast-paced read, as I wanted to know what was going to happen next. For a debut novel, this certainly is far from horrible, I just wish there were some tweaks that would have made this story stand out and flow better.
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