Grey Dog

Author/Guide: Elliott Gish

Why a Booktrail?

1901: Ada Byrd accepts a teaching post in isolated Lowry Bridge where no one knows her secrets.

ISBN: 978-1770417328
Genre: Fiction, Horror

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What you need to know before your trail

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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Lowry Bridge

Fictional but with a strong character:

“The chief feature of the journey from Portsmouth to Lowry Bridge was the thickness of the spruces that lines the sides of the road, clustered so dark and close that, for a fanciful moment, I imagined them pressing in on us, swallowing the road and leaving the land untouched and whole again.”

“Founded nearly 300 years ago by a healthy mix of German, Scots and Englishmen; originally two settlements, each with its own name, both of which I now forget; named for the brothers who built the bridge that spanned the river, connecting the two original communities. The one on the north east bank apparently has the reputation of being the rougher of the two. the southwest side of the river is where civilisation dwells.”