Breakaway Books

Authored by Xenobe Purvis; Published August 2025; Horror

⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Hounding doesn’t fall into the horror genre with the fit you’d imagine. There aren’t jump scares, but trust me, as you read it, you’ll be horrified at how awful men can be. 

In the village of Little Nettlebed, all is not right. Pete Darling, the ferryman, has a grudge against the young Mansfield sisters, who have never seemed quite right to him. Frustrated by their lack of submission, Pete starts a rumor that the sisters are possessed and can turn into dogs, and soon, the news has set the village afire with suspicion. But even Pete can’t foresee all the consequences of such a rumor. 

This little novel presents a microcosm of climate disasters turned into human ones. Suffering from drought, Little Nettlebed’s river slowly dries up, and Pete realizes just a few weeks before his wedding that he will be out of work. The stress mixes with the misogyny his brain is already bathed in, and voila, the Mansfield sisters become villains. It’s a tutorial in how fear and scarcity lead to suffering for the those lacking power, and honestly? It’s incredibly upsetting. Pete Darling is completely ordinary, and for that reason, he is one of the most disturbing villains I’ve ever read about. He makes me understand how the Salem witch trials (and, I suppose, all witch trials) could have happened.

The author also gives an interesting perspective–which strikes me as plausible, even if I can’t say it’s accurate–on how it feels for men when they don’t fit in with other men. Robin, a village boy, is characterized as too gentle for the tastes of the village elders, and the little actions and words he constantly must consider in order to preserve his standing within the community are meticulously detailed. But his is not the saddest arc within the novel; that superlative must surely belong to Temperance, the daughter of an alcoholic who abstains her whole life, only to have Pete shove her over the edge into addiction. It was the one action that Pete took that made my blood boil the most. 

The Hounding isn’t exactly a book I would read to cheer me up or make me forget the awful things happening in the world, but it does shed light on some of the worst behavior we observe in society today. When you’re ready to think about that, pick this one up.