A Review of "The Hounding" by Xenobe Purvis

 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.)

Care to read the rest then do so at the California Review of Books.