Book Review: The Hounding by Xenobe Purvis

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“Girls — normal human girls — people could contend with; they were weak and small. And dogs too could be trained. But girls who became dogs, or let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.”

📚

Strange occurrences routinely happen in the small, 18th-century English village of Little Nettlebed. Bizarre things wash up on shore, ravens congregate on rooftops of people soon to perish, and, as the village wilts in unbearable heat, barking commences, followed by a man who claims to have seen the five Mansfield sisters transform into dogs. His claim stokes widespread fear and obsession, a smoldering situation initially sparked by the villagers’ deep-seated disdain for the Mansfield girls, who they view as peculiar, proud, and, most offensive of all, different. Through rotating perspectives, conflict and extremity emerge, culminating in a clear verdict: something is amiss, and the Mansfields will be held accountable for it.

From the outset, The Hounding is steeped in an intense, escalating sense of dread. Little Nettlebed is a microcosm for the worst of humanity, a coarse region united by rage, the heart of which is the local alehouse. Hatred leaches through the populace like poison, producing reason-devoid, fury-fueled, violence-hungry automatons. Ignorant hordes who drown themselves in liquor, thrive on cruelty, and glory in witch-hunts, scorning kindness and mercy and viewing divergence from established norms as loathsome threats to their meagre existence: enemies of the masses branded as untrustworthy, outsiders who must conform or be broken. Heinous, archaic rituals are upheld for tradition’s sake, while women are viewed as property, used, and eventually ruined.

The singular, spirited Mansfield sisters are scapegoats, “bi*ches” both literal and figurative: females who don’t obey, who act freely and don’t know their place, who dare to do as they please, separate from the majority. They’re untamable, their closeness and understanding with one another transcending language, communicated with mere looks or silences, especially in the company of those who denigrate them.

It’s a tale as old as time where the real pack of vicious beasts aren’t innocent young women, but those who despise and villainize them (namely, men). An all-too-familiar account of misogyny, conventions, roles, hypocrites, grudges, rumors, and punishment where nonconformists are slandered and maligned by jealous, resentful neighbors who blame them for anything and everything, including their own faults and lies. It’s sad and infuriating, bleak and wasteful, devastating and exasperating, savage and haunting, and, ultimately, apt and resonant. A powerful and fantastic novel this reader won’t soon forget.

Works that came to mind while reading:

• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
• Wasps in the Ice Cream by Tim McGregor
• The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield
• “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

Favorite Quotes:

“That was the cunning power of girls . . . They turned a strong man weak. They made a good man penitent.”

“Happiness was frail and flimsy: a petal, a whisper. Hardship was constant. It was muscular and loud. Only fools forgot this vital fact . . . Only fools failed to let it guide their every waking thought and deed.”

“That was the problem with unearthly things, things sent from heaven or from hell: they made witnesses seem like madmen.”

“Some of them were God-fearing, but their main god, the one at whose temple they worshipped most frequently, was violence. . . . If violence was their god, then the alehouse was their church; they congregated there most evenings.”

“Opinions had a way of gathering and sticking . . . like lines of ants swarming to honey. Every grievance found its way back to the sisters, it seemed.”

“This had been a tradition in the village for as long as Temperance could remember. 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.”

“She thought about what they all went through each day: the great, grueling trial of being a woman in a world governed by men. How painful it was, and how humiliating. . . . It made her tense and pale with rage.”

“There had never been anyone like the Mansfield sisters; there would never be anyone like them again. Their spiritedness and singularity, the way rumors about them bred. How people grew preoccupied with them, how they dreaded and pursued them and might eventually ruin them. No other girls in history had ever met with such a fate.”

“Girls had crazy whims and grudges . . . He didn’t trust them. They made him afraid.”

**CW/TW for an extremely difficult scene of animal harm

🖤Amanda

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