Review: The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis

In The Hounding, by Xenobe Purvis, five orphaned young sisters who are living with their grandfather outside Oxford, England, in the early eighteenth century are rumored to be able to turn into a pack of dogs. Witchcraft. So far, so familiar. Narratives from Arthur Miller’s The Crucible to Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch have cast women accused of witchery as a parable for our times, whatever our times are dealing with.

Purvis has chosen masculinity as the thing that is not right in our times and for which the Mansfield sisters of Little Nettlebed will have to pay. The sisters get no say of their own, no voice in their story, a choice that Purvis has deliberately made to showcase her theme. The story is told through rotating points of view, with each chapter offering a different glimpse into a kind of masculinity. Only one woman merits having her own point of view, Temperance Shirly, who runs the riverside pub with her husband. As pub proprietor and voice of womanhood, she is primed to act as a center for gossip.

The first man we meet is Pete Darling, who is of course anything but. His job is to ferry passengers across the river, and when the girls arrive wanting to cross, he makes sure to remind himself that they have no power over him. Yet they also don’t acknowledge him, which sends him into a rage. He stops the ferry midstream to reassert his power, which vaguely worries the sisters, and he “[feeds] on it like a large meal.” The eldest sister, Anne, merely steps off the ferry and walks through the river, in water up to her shoulders, to reach the other side. This causes Pete shame, which we all know is masculine prelude to violence. Just not in chapter one.

Varieties of masculinity arrive in the forms of the girls’ grandfather, Joseph, who is nearly blind and raising them alone after the deaths of their parents; Thomas Mildmay, a strapping and good-hearted lad who comes from a nearby village to help Joseph bring in the hay; and Robin Wildgoose, who Pete Darling describes as “girlish.” In 2025, Pete would have a successful YouTube podcast for sharing his drunken misogynist tirades, and Dickie, Robin’s brother, would be the tween with the chronically ill father who uncritically ate up those tirades.

The use of girls and witchcraft and a small-town historical setting draws clear parallels to The Crucible, and The Hounding’s marketing materials call the play out by name. I hadn’t read The Crucible in decades, so I figured this was my opportunity to give that another go. I can’t say that reading the seventy-year-old play right after The Hounding did the newer novel any favors.

Absolutely ice-cold take incoming: The Crucible is good. As a reminder, the basic plot is that a small handful of girls and young women, including a Black slave, are accused of witchcraft. To save their own skins, they pretend to become victims of witches and start accusing others of practicing witchcraft. Dozens of people are accused and many of them hanged before the charade comes to an end. Miller’s true target was the House Un-American Activities Committee led by Joseph McCarthy, which asked the subjects of its investigations to similarly “name names” of people who had practiced communism. Some did when called before the committee; Miller did not.

The difference between the play and the novel is the depth and layering that Miller builds. There are relationships and reasons for every accusation and defense, and few of them are entirely evil or honorable. There are generational land disputes. There are grudges over positions bestowed and people skipped over. There are secret, intimate affairs. In sum, there are small-town petty squabbles and power struggles, as well as people’s instinct to lie to save their own asses. Every person in the play, including protagonist John Proctor, has to decide if they are going to do the right thing or the expedient thing. Proctor can save his wife from hanging, but only if he admits he was having an affair with Abigail, one of the originally accused girls who has named as many names as she can in an attempt to both win him back and punish him.

Purvis, in contrast, eschews depth and layering. Her characters each represent a facet of masculinity, and that is all they represent. Pete is drunken rage, Thomas is sacrificial goodness, Joseph is lost manhood, Robin is outside the norms. Purvis intended, I think, to indict the online performance of masculinity and possibly its real-world consequences. Instead, the novel is an indictment of the shallow, scrollable surface of online interactions. There are no ulterior motives, no power plays (other than Pete’s blatant wish to have power over women). What the sisters want to achieve or get out of turning into dogs, or having people think they turn into dogs, is unexplored. What the community thinks of the Mansfield family is vague, so it’s not clear why everyone so easily believes they would do something so weird and in defiance of the injunction against witchcraft in the Bible.

It brings to mind Brandon Taylor’s essay “Against Casting Tape Fiction,” which takes aim at first-person narration that has no interiority—no thoughts, just vibes. The Hounding is about as far from first person POV as you can get, being a collection of a half-dozen or so third-person points of view, all offering their versions of the Mansfield sisters and their takes on the rumors. But I think Tyler’s insight still applies here, even if the reader is not riding along inside the head of the narrator:“This generation of writers did not grow up as readers. They grew up as watchers. Their experience of consciousness is fundamentally a mediated one. It exists solely on the surface.” Lengthy quote from Taylor incoming:

What I mean to say is that for many contemporary writers today, they are not working from life itself. They are working from a mediation of life. They are working from a set of abstractions that have been conveyed to them via reality television and cinema and social media. Their reality is already a story world, and so when it comes time to construct a novel or a story or a play,what we have is reality at a second remove. This is a second order storyworld,where the behaviors of the characters are not governed by the rules of life or a set of rules based on life. The behaviors in these secondary storyworlds are judged according to rules based on rules based on rules from life. So that we judge them, not according to whether their actions or responses or feelings refer back to real life as we understand it, but according to whether or not they behave properly like characters in a story.

Miller’s characters behaved like people. They made decisions based on flawed logic and heated emotions, and they paid for those decisions. Purvis’s characters are like a bell choir with each person being given one bell that rings one note.

The Hounding will resonate with a lot of people, and it is easy to read. You can easily squeeze it in as an end-of-summer read to transition to the weightier tomes of fall. It has a gothic feel, and if you want your beliefs about the manosphere echoed in historical fiction, Purvis provides. Other reviewers seem to love it. But it lacks the depth that will have readers turning to it decades later as a searing social critique.

Links to stuff in this post:

(I receive an affiliate commission from Bookshop.org if you order using these links. Thank you!)

• The Hounding, Xenobe Purvis: https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9781250366382
• The Crucible, Arthur Miller: https://bookshop.org/a/7065/9780143129479
• "Against Casting Tape Fiction," Sweater Weather, Brandon Taylor: https://blgtylr.substack.com/p/against-casting-tape-fiction