"The Hounding"
By Xenon Purvis
Henry Holt & Company
We’re in the midst of spooky season.
And while I’m a chicken when it comes to straight-up horror, I’m not immune to the delights of witchcraft-adjacent fiction, especially when it has a feminist bent.
This led me to Xenobe Purvis’ debut novel, “The Hounding,” about five young orphaned sisters who live with their nearly-blind elderly grandfather in Little Nettlebed, a small English village, in the 1700s. (The town’s name should hint at how welcoming the community is to the imaginative, self-possessed Mansfield sisters.)
When the town drunk, Pete, a ferryman who’s nervous about his upcoming wedding, claims to have seen the standoffish sisters change into dogs late one night, the rumor – in the brutal heat of summer, which also threatens Pete’s livelihood – catches fire.
Purvis provides the reader with some key insights into Pete’s character before this pivotal moment. Namely, when the girls ferry back across the river, after dyeing their clothes black in mourning (their grandmother died shortly before the story’s start), Pete makes conversation. The girls show him their backs and ignore him. Enraged and petulant, Pete imagines the sisters drowning in the brown water, then stops the ferry midstream. The oldest sister, Anne, coolly announces that they could wade the rest of the way across, then enters the water to do just that, which makes Pete all the angrier.
Drinking at the pub later, Pete “thought about the girl. The way she waded, mocking him. The way her clothes had clung to her body. The way he’d pictured her in the water before she climbed in. Funny that: almost as though he had willed it into being. Perhaps he was more powerful after all, more favoured, more likely to pass through the gates of heaven. Yes. He took a sip of ale and smiled, liking the idea. That sounded right to him.”
Because readers see how Pete must recast reality to restore his sense of power and masculinity in the situation (while also degrading Anne), we are primed to be more skeptical of his claims than his fellow villagers are.
One of the few to defend the girls is a teetotaling young barmaid, fittingly named Temperance, who goes to the local vicar for help, only to have him also grow convinced that something evil has possessed the girls.
Being a dog in 18th century Little Nettlebed is looking better than being a girl more and more, isn’t it?
Told in chapters that focus on the perspectives of Pete, Temperance, Joseph (the girls’ loving grandfather), Thomas (a young farmhand who falls for Anne), and Robin, a gentle boy whose younger brother, Richard, stands at a personal crossroads, this slim, sly novel builds its tension quietly, deftly showing us who these characters are far before they confront each other at the narrative’s crisis point.
Indeed, when church attendance spikes, due to curiosity about whether the girls might shape-shift during a service, Robin notes that “the villagers were more afraid of the girls themselves than they were of the dogs. Girls – normal human girls – people could contend with; they were weak and small. And dogs too can be trained. But girls who became dogs, or who let the world believe they were dogs, were either powerful or mad: both monstrous possibilities.”
When an inevitable showdown occurs, violence breaks out, and several characters make irrevocable, life-changing choices.
Despite the tale's moments of darkness, there is something charmingly old-fashioned about “The Hounding.” As with a scary story told round a campfire, Purvis doesn't rush toward the climax, but rather takes her time, letting the slow-build be one of the novel's many pleasures.
For this reason, I didn't cruise through this small book at the pace I'd expected to. But that likely says more about me as a reader in the Digital Age than it does about Purvis' storytelling. Books that demand I downshift frustrate me, on one level, but also leave a deeper, more meaningful mark in the end.
Which is to say, I'll likely be thinking about this gorgeously atmospheric novel, and its many ambiguities, for a dog's age to come.
