Jessica Woodbury's Reviews > Grey Dog

One of the best horror novels of the year. An eerie slow burn set in a small Canadian town in 1901 about a schoolteacher escaping her past. I enjoyed this very much but it's almost hard to review because I just want to push it into people's hands and tell them to read it.

While it takes a little time for the horror-y bits to pick up, I didn't find the book itself a dull read. Instead from the beginning we know Ada has a complicated history and that she is struggling to figure out who she is and what she wants. It's no help that she has basically no options as an unmarried woman nearing 30, and cannot tolerate her restrictive father's home. I liked spending time with Ada, and as the book is in diary form it was always nice to have her sit down to tell me about her day.

We slowly build the horror, it's never a straight up scare, but there is a fair amount of gore on the page. (Near the end there is some actual violence, though before that it is mostly the corpses of woodland creatures.) But this is one of my favorite kinds of horror novels that is actually About Something. While modern feminist horror is often quite muddled, once you go back in time over 100 years it's a clearer story. Ada is a feminist character, a woman who wants freedom, a woman who feels the pain of the limitations put on her life. She is also someone who is so used to those limits that she doesn't fully realize what she wants and how she feels. Following her own journey of self-discovery as she comes closer and closer to a supernatural force, becoming more animal is the very kind of thing that starts to appeal to Ada and her love of the natural world. It works quite seamlessly, considering feminism, sexuality, freedom, patriarchy without making you feel like you are being hit over the head with the themes.

A confident debut and I hope we see much more from Gish.