Some people like to take walks in the wood to clear their heads.
But you probably shouldn’t ask writer Elliott Gish to take a stroll among the trees if relaxation is your objective. At least not if what she says about her haunted forest horror novel Grey Dog (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) in the following email interview is any indication.
Photo Credit: William Dicks
To begin, what is Grey Dog about, and when and where is this story set?
Grey Dog is a historical literary horror novel about rage, fear, and desire.
After suffering a series of personal and professional tragedies, schoolteacher and amateur naturalist Ada Byrd takes a teaching job in an isolated town called Lowry Bridge. As she settles into her new life, she begins to experience grotesque phenomena whose origins seem to be the woods that surround the town. Ada becomes convinced that a strange presence lurks beneath the trees, watching her. She might be right.
Where did you get the idea for Grey Dog? What inspired it?
One of the primary inspirations for Grey Dog was the feeling I get when I walk in the woods alone. Your brain, in that situation, is hardwired to worry about predators; you can’t help but think that something is standing just out of sight, watching you. It is such a potent feeling that I needed to make a story out of it: What if there really was something watching? What if that fear isn’t just an evolutionary mechanism kicking in, but a real reaction to something that you cannot see?
Another inspiration was L.M. Montgomery, the author of Anne Of Green Gables (and dozens of other great Canadian books). Montgomery was one of my favorite authors as a child, and while Anne and many other books she wrote are rather light, some of her fiction has a darker undercurrent that made me interested in learning more about her personal life.
When I read a Montgomery biography, and then her collected journals, I realized what a complicated and unhappy woman she really was. She was, famously, a schoolteacher before finding tremendous success as an author, but she did not enjoy teaching at all — it was just the only profession open to women of her time and class. Now we see teaching more as an individual vocation, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, women became teachers because they could not make a respectable living any other way. A lot of women who did it had no particular passion for it. Montgomery was one of those, and gave voice to her distaste quite liberally in her journals.
At some point, those two ideas fused in my head, and Ada Byrd was born: a teacher who hates teaching, a naturalist who becomes more and more afraid of nature.
Why did you decide to set in 1901 as opposed to 1991 or 2001 or maybe even 2201?
In a lot of ways, it didn’t feel like a decision I made. The story showed up in my head, and the period was already an integral part of it. In 1901, social mores were stricter, communication was more difficult, it took longer to travel from place to place, everyone was more isolated by geography than they currently are. Setting the story in this period heightened the feeling of danger. When Ada’s mental state begins to deteriorate and her experiences become more and more frightening, the restrictions of the era (and her place in it as an unmarried woman) make it much harder for her to simply leave Lowry Bridge.
I also really love to write about what I think of as liminal times. Whenever we look at the seam where two strictly defined historical eras meet, we find these strange, in-between moments that aren’t quite one thing or another. In this case, the Victorian era is giving way to the Edwardian era. A lot of change occurred in the late Victorian and early Edwardian eras: reforms, social upheaval, shifting standards of behaviour — especially for women! But although the Victorian era technically ended in 1901, Victorian ideals about femininity and how women ought to behave were still very much alive. Ada hears the call of change, but still feels fettered by the way she was brought up and how she has been taught to understand the world around her. That conflict between new and old ways of being is a huge part of what makes Grey Dog the story that it is.
That being said, I would be interested in seeing a 2201 version of the novel. I’m imagining Ada on a rocket ship, pursued by a space version of the grey dog. Something with tentacles, maybe.
That sounds like a manga. As for this version of Grey Dog, it sounds like a haunted forest horror story. Is that how you’d describe it?
I would and I wouldn’t. There aren’t really any ghosts in the woods that surround Lowry Bridge, so it is not a traditional haunting in that sense, but there is something there, and it is definitely haunting Ada. Whether that something is real or a symptom of her mental and emotional deterioration is up to the reader.
But how scary is Grey Dog? Like is it just freaky and weird, or is it going scare to the crap out of people, including people who love dogs? And why was this the right amount of scariness for this story?
I must admit, I hope that it will scare the crap out of people. I personally do not find the book to be too scary, but there is a limit to how frightened you can be of your own story, especially while you are writing it. Since ECW [the publisher] started sending out ARCs [advanced reading copies, i.e. reviewers copies], I have gotten some comments from readers who said that they shouldn’t have started reading the book when they were alone, or after dark, so it may be more frightening than I had originally thought.
I would say that dog lovers are fine, but people who are particularly afraid of the woods might find themselves wanting to sleep with the light on afterward.
Now, Grey Dog is your first published novel, but you’ve had stories in such journals as Dark Matter Magazine, The Baltimore Review, and others. Are there any writers, or stories, that had a big influence on Grey Dog but not on anything else you’ve written? You mentioned L.M. Montgomery earlier.
The Turn Of The Screw by Henry James and The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman were huge inspirations for Grey Dog in particular.
But the strangest source of influence for the book is a YA novel I read in sixth grade called Go Ask Alice. It is supposedly the real diary of a teenage girl who started using drugs; after the girl died, her diary was “discovered” by an editor. (It wasn’t a real diary, of course, just marketed that way to capitalize on anxiety about teen drug use.) It is such a transparently didactic book that it barely works as a story, but at one point, the diary becomes very fragmented as the author “drops out” of society and drifts around for a few months, writing little snippets of thought on scraps of paper. The way that shift in structure changed that part of the narrative and really drove home how her whole world was beginning to fall apart stuck with me.
That was a huge inspiration for a later point in Grey Dog, when Ada is beginning to lose her grip on reality. Influences and inspirations are such a strange grab bag of odds and ends — your mind latches onto the weirdest stuff and keeps it.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games?
I love well-made horror films in which the spooky stuff creeps up on you, rather than being thrown at you all at once — a slow build in which the atmosphere thickens with dread as you watch.
A few movies that influenced this book were The Witch by Robert Eggers, Midsommar by Ari Aster, and, of course, The Blair Witch Project by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez.
That last was one of the first movies I watched that really scared me, partly because it never really spells out what is going on. We never see the witch, or find out exactly what she wants, and it ends without giving us any kind of closure. That element of mystery, that feeling that there is something still to be discovered, makes the film more interesting. My favorite horror stories, regardless of what form they take, are brave enough not to answer all the questions they raise. That is what I tried to do with Grey Dog. I wanted to write a book that embraced ambiguity, that ended without spoon-feeding anything to the audience.
And then, to flip things around, do you think Grey Dog could work as a movie?
I think Grey Dog would absolutely work as a movie. The framing would have to change a bit, as the novel is in the form of a diary, and it all takes place within Ada’s head, but I think the imagery in the book could lend itself to some great, eerie sets and scenes.
And if someone wanted to adapt Grey Dog into a movie, who would you want them to cast as Ada and the other main characters?
I always pictured Ada as looking a little like a frumped-up Mae Whitman [Parenthood], so if she is ever interested in filming a horror movie about a turn-of-the-century schoolmarm having a psychosexual breakdown in the woods, she should give me a call.
Ditto Carrie-Anne Moss [The Matrix], who would be my first choice for Norah Kinsley.
So, is there anything else you think people need to know about Grey Dog?
Grey Dog is, at its core, a story about wanting. When we first meet Ada, she is so staunchly buttoned-up that she hardly knows that she wants anything. Her life has been so confined by convention that she is unable to imagine anything better for herself. But with every strange encounter she has with the grey dog, that fierce grip she has on herself loosens. In that loosening, she becomes more able to understand herself and her desires: for love, for sex, for violence, and, ultimately, for freedom. Her loss of control is also her liberation.
Also, it’s gay!
Finally, if someone enjoys Grey Dog, what haunted forest horror novel of someone else’s would you suggest they read next?
Either Caitlin R. Kiernan’s The Red Tree or Emily Carroll’s graphic novel Through The Woods. They are very different books — The Red Tree is weird fiction with a Lovecraftian vibe, while Through the Woods is grounded in folk and fairy tales — but both are books that got me between their teeth and shook me hard.
