Holt
Review by George Yatchisin
Xenobe Purvis can write spooky, but then there are all sorts of haunts, aren’t there? Her debut novel The Hounding, set during the 18th-century in Little Nettlebed astride the Thames River—but far away, in distance and in thought, from London—concerns the Mansfield sisters, orphaned, insular, feminine threats, particularly to the small-minded males of the village. The book gives its plot culmination away in its first line (in what reads like a dark version of Johnny Carson’s old Carnac routine): “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body.” But the book never surrenders its air of mystery—do the Mansfields have the power to transform into dogs? Then again, its theme is sussing out the line between what’s human and humane. (Note we are piss poor at the latter.)
Purvis’s book has been touted as a meeting of The Virgin Suicides and The Crucible, but that makes it sound more derivative and less deep than it is. For if we care to toss about predecessors to this work, there’s a vein of rural misogyny erupting into violence from Straw Dogs, particularly in a grueling passage in which tavern-goers bait, beat, and kill a badger, even forcing a meek young villager to take part against his wishes. There’s a general air of seduction and the power of the unanswerable that recalls Picnic at Hanging Rock. And the totemic power of the river—especially as it dries up in a prolonged summer drought—alongside what could almost read like a Southern U.S. sense of righteous faith and a distaste for “uncleanness,” suggests the mytho-poetic The Night of the Hunter.
For in many ways The Hounding is an all-too-realistic fairy tale. Who has more power than a girl on the age of being a woman, so multiply that by five, give them a bit of freedom, and watch the “normal” world try to make sense of things. Given how much the power of women still feels threatening today (just ask Hillary or Kamala), imagine what that could mean 300, supposedly much more “primitive,” years ago? Or don’t, just read this book.
Purvis artfully manipulates third-person limited narration, each chapter giving us another villager’s view of the sisters, from the sisters’ blind, caring, confused grandfather Joseph Mansfield to the drunken, brutish, prone-to-visions ferryman Pete Darling, from the mild Robin Wildgoose to the thoughtful publican’s wife Temperance Shirly. It’s fascinating we never get into the Mansfield girls’ minds even at a third-person remove—we must piece them and their reasons together like all the other characters do. That makes for treacherous moments, especially in a place where gossip is currency, or as Purvis puts it: “the gossiper not only gave but took; something was required of the listener.”
And Little Nettlebed, especially during a scorchingly hot and dry season, is a perfect petri dish for all the rumors about Mary, Grace, Hester, Elizabeth, and Anne (names that are very normal yet drag along so many cultural and literary associations). For even the mean-spirited oaf Pete Darling can put things this way: “The truth is like a water creature, too large for any single man to catch. He can take hold of one tentacle, or a silver tail, or a fin, but he’ll never catch the whole creature, not on his own.” The glory of groupthink is, after all, it makes you part of a group. That’s certainly safer.
Alas, going with the crowd in Little Nettlebed makes you one of the mob. That rigid, socially reinforcing fear has some unusual expressions—for example, if a woman dies in childbirth, her pallbearers must be pregnant women. Temperance thinks, observing such a procession: “No one knew how it had come about, and no one had ever seriously tried to stop it; the oldest and cruelest traditions were usually the hardest to cast off.”
One of the possible corrections for regressive ritual could be science, but even that fails the Mansfields. The doctor who arrives from Oxford to examine them, with the ironic name of John Friend, diagnoses as if he studied medicine at the RFK Jr. School of Sham and Stupidity. To be fair, he’s on the cutting edge for his time, mentioning “hysteric disorders” and “erratic animal spirits.” But his visit simply underlines how malleable the lines between faith and fiction, medicine and magic can be.
Here we are in 2025, with the powers that be insisting a person in an inflatable frog suit is a terrorist threat worthy of pepper spraying. Why shouldn’t the unsophisticated in the 1700s imagine teen girls can turn themselves into dogs?
