THE HOUNDING, by Xenobe Purvis
Welcome to Little Nettlebed, England, where the “season of strangeness” has begun.
Heat is addling every resident’s mind, priming them to feel indiscriminate rage — toward even “the sound of the birds, the air on their skin.” A sturgeon, huge and unholy, is found beached along the shrinking river.
And there are the Mansfield girls — five orphaned, aloof sisters in mourning, whose self-possession and inscrutable mien make their neighbors uneasy. The local drunk, a misogynistic ferryman named Pete Darling, swears he’s seen them transform into a pack of dogs, and before long, news of his dubious vision has bolted around town.
Xenobe Purvis’s outstanding debut novel, “The Hounding,” unfolds in 1700s Oxfordshire, but the atmosphere of paranoia and bloodthirsty groupthink often feels uncomfortably familiar.
The Mansfields — Anne, Elizabeth, Hester, Grace and Mary, so close that their names spoken aloud sound like an incantation, or a prayer — live just beyond town with their grandfather Joseph, a recent widower. Half-blind and benevolent, like a sweetly fictionalized John Milton, Joseph presides over what once was a happy, liberated farm. His wife had a fiercely independent streak: a point of pride for Joseph, and a trait they nurtured in their granddaughters. Now his greatest wish is to protect the girls from malign incursions, and he’s right to worry — beyond his home is “a ravenous world, a world with teeth.”
True to its name, there’s an ominous air throughout Little Nettlebed. “If violence was their god, then the alehouse was their church,” Purvis writes of the villagers. No one models this better than Pete Darling, who is prone to visitations from angels and vaguely biblical dreams while recovering from a bender.
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