Book Club: Let's Talk About 'The Hounding' by Xenobe Purvis

We gave Times employees a preview of Crossplay from New York Times Games, and here's what they had to say. I can finally play with other people. I'm pretty competitive. It's fun to beat friends and co-workers. I have a J for 10 points. I'm guessing tanga is not a word. Let's see. Tanga is a word. Oh. As in English as a second language speaker, I like to learn new words. New York Times Game subscribers get full access to Crossplay, our first two-player word game. Subscribe now for a special offer on all of our games. The Hounding came out last year, and I'm just going to lay my cards out on the table. I think it's really good. I had a lovely time reading it. It got my brain thinking. I wanted to tell everyone about it. And that made me think, wait a second. I want to tell everybody about it. Let's do it for a book club. So that's what we're here to do today. We're going to talk about this book. And joining me in that adventure are a panel of my wonderful colleagues. Just going around the horn, we have Jumana Khatib. Hi, Jumana. Hey, MJ. We have Emily Aiken. Hello, MJ. And Greg Coles. Glad to be here, MJ. All returning book clubbers, welcome back. Before we dig in, I have my typical admin notes. First, there will be spoilers in this episode, but to keep this episode and conversation accessible, the first half of the discussion will be spoiler-free slash spoiler-light. We'll talk about the setup, we'll talk about some details, but we're not going to talk about the ending, where things go. That will be in the second half, which will be spoiler-filled. That's note number one. And then note number two is at the end of the episode, we will reveal our February book club pick. So stay with us until the end to find out what we're going to be reading next. To get started, could someone give us a brief setup? What is this book, The Hounding? Sure. So you've set it up for us. It's a debut novel by a British writer, Zeneby Purvis. It is a taught, clever, beautifully written book that really straddles the line between naturalistic historical fiction and fable. So it takes place in the year 1700 in rural Oxfordshire, England, in a fictional village on the River Thames with a rather marvelous name, like a lot of the names in this book, of Little Nettlebed. And it recounts from the point of view of different members of the village, a stifling summer in which strange happenings begin to accumulate and alarming rumors fly about five local girls who are granddaughters of a local farmer. And according to these rumors, these girls routinely transform into a pack of wild dogs and wreak havoc in the village, killing people's chickens and wild animals and livestock. And these girls are already pretty unpopular in the village. Even before the rumors start, they're considered odd and standoffish and snobbish. In subtle and not so subtle ways, they don't conform to social convention regarding female behavior, not to mention they have sharp little pointed teeth or are said to. And so the question that looms over the novel is exactly what is happening and who or what is responsible. And for a novel so taught, I'll just add, it's only 225 pages, I think. This book delves into some heady themes, the power of groupthink and reason versus superstition and perhaps most provocatively, gender relations. It really invites a meditation on male authority, violence, misogyny, female empowerment and defiance. So a lot is going on in this book. That was a beautiful setup. Thank you, Emily. So that is the stage. But now I want to know the players. Because we follow like a rotating cast of characters. Could someone give us a rundown of who these characters are? Sure, I can do that. Central to the book are the five Mansfield sisters. They are in age order. Ann is the oldest. Then Elizabeth, who is the prettiest. And then there is the younger three are all grouped together, Hester and Grace and Mary, who each have their own thing. But the two older ones are held out more distinctly from the others. But we never get to know these girls from their own perspective because the book rotates instead among five other perspectives, not the girls' perspectives. And those are the local drunkard ferryman, Pete Darling. There's Thomas, an outsider who comes to the Mansfield Farm to help with haymaking. We get the local publican, the wife of the man who runs the bar. Her name is Temperance, so-called by the townspeople, because although she works at the pub, she does not drink herself and in fact looks down on drinking. And so they name her Temperance instead of Sarah, her given name. And the two other perspectives are a young adolescent town's boy named Robin and the girl's grandfather, Joseph, who they grew up with him and his wife as their caretakers. And his wife has recently died. So we see him as the kind of grieving widower. He's blind or going blind, and he has the care of his five granddaughters. Greg, you aced that quiz. Well done. So our stage is set. We have the characters. And now let's dive in. I want to know, just get this conversation started, top-level thoughts about this book. Love it. Hate it. Feel mixed about it. And I want to start with you, Jumana, because you reviewed this book for us. And we're editors here at the book review. We're mostly behind the scenes. And what that means is that when we as editors review something, it's usually because we're reading and we see something in a book that makes us think, wait, actually pause. I want to write about this one myself. As the person who that happened to as our reviewer, can you tell us what it was that you saw? What made you think I want this one? The conceit is so great. And we'll get to this later. I think I have been noticing, as I think several of us have, a lot of gothic and a lot of horror in new ways. And honest to God, the first paragraph was one of those paragraphs where I read it and I was like, okay, like this is something worth paying attention to. I'm going to read it. I was going to say, can you read it for us? Because it's so good. Because there are times when, and I've said this on this podcast before, like I think when a lot of us are looking through books at the pace that we do, it's almost like eating without chewing. And then every once in a while, you'll come across a conceit or a description, or for me, it's almost always the writing that really makes me like stand up and take notice. This is how the hounding opens. The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers, adorned with gaudy ribbons, some carrying stones, saw exactly what had taken place. The girls had found their quarry at last, the bite mark on the man's fist, the spreading blood, spoke of an unholy struggle. There's not a single wasted syllable in that paragraph. And I was actually thinking it kind of reminds me of my friends will send me voice memos with their dreams. And I was like, wow, we got a lot going on here. You know, I'm locked into this. So I was really, as they say, seated for the entirety of this book. And first of all, I was just so excited to encounter this author. I think this is a standout debut novel. And sometimes it's not always fair to talk about a book in terms of an author's first or second. But to me, this felt like right out of the gate, Zeneby Purvis had an articulated vision and language and idiom. It was clear that she was drawing from a lot of literary antecedents. You know, I felt like a bit of John Milton. There's a whole thing about the outside world that feels Edenic or the like prelapsarian, like the fall. And I think it was just a really well executed conceit. And frankly, her writing even about the natural world is incredible. And I was so happy to see people talk about this also as like a climate parable. So there's so much packed into this really slim book. And it's almost like opening like a paper chain of dolls. It's like every time you look at it, there's more that it holds. So I'm very enthusiastic about this book. Two things. You mentioned not always wanting to point out what number of book a given title is for an author. But for me, I think it's notable when something's a debut that feels assured because so many writers, every writer figures themselves out through the process of writing, through subsequent books, through publishing, through reception. And so it's especially notable when you have someone out the gate whose perspective feels so unique and honed, but then also who's not afraid to, I'm going to borrow a term that you sometimes say, Jumana, who's not afraid to freak it. Who's, we're going to be weird and that's okay. And I'm not trying to like bow to any other whims or demands. This is the book I want to write. So that comes through for sure in this. But I wanted to ask a follow-up question. So that was your impression when you first read it. It captured you. Did that feeling follow through in the rest of your experience? Tell me more about how you feel about top level of the book. Okay. I should acknowledge up front that I am not necessarily a person who reads for plot, even though I think it was fairly obvious where the story was going in terms of, it actually even tells you from the first page what's going on. but I liked the use of multiple narrative viewpoints. I liked the fable feeling to it. And honest to God, like before I knew it, it was over. So it actually had that dream feeling to me a little bit. So yes, it really did carry me through the entire reading experience. What about you, Greg? What are your top level thoughts? Top level thoughts. I was very impressed by this book. The writing is gorgeous at the sentence level, at the word level. She constantly surprises in the writing, in the language. Plot-wise, I've felt her leaning into convention sometimes in ways that, yes, it was predictable what was going to happen. It felt very much not just a genre novel. It toggles between genres. It is gothic. It is horror. It is thriller and mystery and suspense. Fable, parable. Yeah, yeah. We could keep going. We'll list every genre. And she draws beautifully on those, but in conventional and sometimes formulaic ways so that it's easy to settle into the book because you have a sense of, oh, I know where I'm going. But in a way that might also have diminished my enjoyment of it, were she not skilled, really enjoyed reading it despite seeing where it was going to go. I 100% agree. I think we were talking about what it's like to have a debut, and a debut writer often labors under the necessary associations. Oh, for readers who love The Crucible and The Virgin Suicides, this is a convention of debut novels is we're introducing you to a writer and you should think of this writer in this category. And actually, to be fair, I actually thought about The Scarlet Letter a lot, the opening scene of the crowd of townspeople with their stones in their wedding finery. They've attended a wedding. I thought of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery. We've seen similar scenes in literature before. But what I want to stress, and I've read this book twice and I feel more strongly about it now on a second reading, is this is not a derivative novel in any way. So she's playing with these illusions. And I think one of our commenters actually went through the names of the Mansfield sisters and associated them with proto or pre-feminist heroines and literature from Austin to Margaret Atwood to actually to The Scarlet Letter. So this is, I'm going to intrude and just say one of our commenters, we always do this We have an article up in the New York Times for our book club where people can join the conversation online And that is titled Book Club Read the Hounding by Zena B Purvis with the book review And so that where that where we had wonderful commenters So you such great readers if any of you are listening to this episode. And yes, I think she is playing with these literary allusions, but at the same time making the story wholly her own. And I came away feeling that it was much more ambiguous than I had at first realized because I'd made assumptions based on the template, the kind of literary conventions and tropes. We'll dig into that. So we have this story. There's a small town, these outsider girls, and this rumor that they turn into a pack of dogs. But it takes a little bit to get there. Tell me your thoughts about the story as it's laid out. What stands out to you? Walk us through, Greg. Yeah, I want to talk about the ambiguity that she plays with. And one reason for that ambiguity is that we never get the point of view of the sisters themselves. If we did, we could learn very readily. Do they in fact turn into dogs? We never get an answer to that. We get different viewpoints and belief systems feeding that. But we are in the role of the townspeople needing to make our own decision on that. the setup to get to that point, Pete Darling, who, to the extent that she plays with names and has allusions to other things, the first time I saw Pete Darling's name, I thought of Peter Pan with Wendy Darling, the Darling family and Peter Pan, which is whimsical in part, but also very much kind of the comment on the eternal boy. The child man. The child man, exactly. And so that's, and he takes this, he's the ferryman. He has an instinctual bond with nature. He knows the river, which is drying up. There's the climate parable that people are commenting on. His livelihood is going to go away, at least for this summer, because of the drought. He is drawn in a horrified, perverse way to these sisters. He's fascinated by them. He also feels inferior. He's just straight up misogynist. He is a true villain in the book. He's a real antagonist. And so he is fascinated by them and hates them, but doesn't quite know why he hates them. And that's the buildup into eventually that he's the one who lobs the accusation that kind of catches fire. And another key element, I think, of his story is that he notoriously lies. So he's famous as a storyteller and has a history of making up fictions. And he also has visions. Especially after he's been drinking. Drinking. Yeah. Yes. Right. Drinking seems to be the gateway to all kinds of mischievous behaviors and dubious actions. He holds himself to be very religious. He pictures his mother in heaven. And one of his earlier visions was having seen an angel. And so there's a lot in here about is he on the side of good? He sees himself as being on the side of good. Pete Darling was one of my favorite characters, which feels wild to say because he's a monster. It's not that I liked Pete Darling. it's that he is full and he steps onto the stage and your heart just starts to beat because he's so monstrous. He's so sinister. He's so creepy. And like, he's very on the nose. Xenobie is not subtle about his misogyny. He sees the girls and menaces them. At one point, he's ferrying them across and then just stops in the middle of the river. And he thinks so directly, it was nice to be in control of their fate. But even though he's so on the nose, He is more than a character to me. He was like a feeling, an atmosphere, almost like a music cue. You could feel the oppression and the shadow that he weighed down. And I thought he was so effectively rendered that whenever he was on the page, whenever he was in a scene, I was excited. The tension was ratcheted up. The stakes were ratcheted up. I think Pete was a very effective introduction to the town of Little Nettlebed for a couple of reasons. They say the people who consistently tell the truth are drunks and children. Okay. So we have drunk Peter Pan. So great. And then also midway through, the book takes its time in establishing just how much is wrong or rancid in town. There's a line in there. She writes, if violence was their God, the alehouse was their church. Listeners cannot see. That was off the dome. You did that from memory. These lines stay with you. They stick out. Did anyone pick up on another description of Pete that really stayed with me? This is an observation made by Robin Wild Goose, who is a local villager who codes rather feminine. He's struggling with the kind of masculinity that the village seems to expect in its young men. I think the very first line about him is, Robin Wild Goose was not like other men. Yeah, not like other men. And he is very uncomfortable riding Pete's ferry. and early on, he thinks to himself, he was like a bloodhound, which has picked up the scent. And this is in a book where Pete Darling is, of course, alleging that the young women, the young Mansfield sisters are this pack of wild dogs. And so it's just interesting to think about the canine monster. I love the way that the writer looks through the world because the horror is that, yes, the girls are turning into dogs, but like almost everybody in this book is associated with an animal in one way or another. Somebody described Pete as having a carrion eating face. So good. You know, like, yes, that's exactly it. It's like it gets at the sort of like vulturist impulses and just like the horror of that. But it's funny when you say wild goose and like Thomas Mildman, the names are so good. The names are amazing. It's worth talking about the names, I think, right? Absolutely. Even Mansfield for the farmer. Yeah. You do think of Joseph Mansfield, John Milton. I mean, someone made that connection. And I think Milton is a town actually where Thomas, the farmhand, and one outsider comes to kind of live with the Mansfield family. He's from a town called Milton. I just think she's having so much fun with these illusions. But as you pointed out, Emily, in our setup, for such serious themes, We're talking about sexism and misogyny and very toxic masculinity. I want to ask about that. Can we talk about those themes as they play out and are rendered and explored through this? Do we feel that exploration was smart? Did this move the needle anyway? Talk to me about how you felt about the themes and the approach to the themes through this book. I thought that for such a short book and a book that had to hew so closely to conventions, it did a remarkable job of organically fitting in so many topical contemporary themes, not just misogyny and climate, also class. There's a lot of class resentment against the Mansfields. There was a time of famine and Mansfield, who grows wheat, charged inflated prices at that time. And Thomas, who's now coming to help him make the hay, as a boy, used to go and throw rocks at the rich farmers for inflating their prices. He could well have thrown rocks at Joseph Mansfield himself. There's a really good passage on the subject of the misogyny inherent, because one of the wonderful things about Joseph the grandfather is that, you know, he and his wife really wanted their girls to be independent and have freedom. That's partially why these girls are apart from a lot of the town, is that they've lived in this much more liberated kind of environment or subset of Little Nettlebed. And when I was reading this book for the first time, I was thinking, I was like, what is the real source of the horror? Is it the fact that they're like not actually girls or is it the fact of how different they are? Is that the real source of horror? So there's a good passage. This is from the point of view of the villagers. Girls, normal human girls, people could contend with. They were weak and small and dogs too could be trained. But girls who became dogs or who let the world believe they were dogs were either powerful or mad. both monstrous possibilities, which just so crystallizes the central issue with these sisters. One thing I found so fascinating about this book is a long time ago, I was interviewing Lauren Groff about her book, Florida, and she said something. She said that when she was in school, she received advice from a teacher that was, if you want to write politically, you cannot write pedantically, which I think is pretty sound advice. I'll second that. This book is so on the nose. It is a little pedantic. Some of these quotes are so direct. And yet it worked for me. And as I was reading, I was trying to figure out how does this book get over that? How does it break that world? Partly because it does lend itself to being read as a fable. And fables by nature have morals. Yeah. That was my theory. I was like, the fabilistic quality, the atmosphere, even though the fables have morals, but the book never felt obvious to me. I could tell what was going to happen again from the outset, from that prologue, what happens. And we're reading to figure out how, but even though I knew it was going to happen, the atmosphere, the book never felt obvious because in this world, it felt like anything could happen. And so I felt like her creativity in constructing this story gave her freedom to make this a fable, to make this moralistic. in a way that didn't feel overly preachy to me. Totally. And I would say that the book turns out to be much more ambiguous than the opening. In fact, what the book does is totally unravel the first page, right? So on the first page, we're linking a dead body to these girls, and these villages are coming, presumably, with instruments of punishment, these stones, right? Wearing wedding finery, by the way. Wearing wedding finery. So the girls are the predators, and the body is their prey. Actually, over the course of the novel, we'll see that narrative get very complicated, if not completely unraveled. And I think where we end up is in a much more ambiguous place. But I guess I keep thinking whether Xenobie Purvis intended this, I don't know how long it took her to write this book. I think it really resonates as beautifully written as it is with us and others today because it does seem like an allegory for our moment, the resurgent manosphere. So it just feels so resonant with a moment when this idea of traditional gender roles, a kind of regressive social order is so prominent along with, and I think this is also so clever about this book, setting it in 1700, which isn't quite the age of reason. Voltaire is still a baby in 1700. However, so superstition reigns and people... But they don't want it. They keep saying, oh, we don't believe in that anymore. Well, the village is quite polarized. So, you know, the vicar believes in hellfire and brimstone and heaven and girls turning into dogs. And his friend, Pete Darling's future father-in-law says, I don't believe that stuff. This church has trouble with new ideas, with science. And I loved that, that this book is situated in this moment of total ambiguity about belief systems. And we're in that moment again right now. I want to mention you talked about the timeframe. so in an interview with NPR Zeneby said that she quote came across the true story of five sisters in 1700 who were said to be seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs and Zeneby says I wanted to know what had actually happened to the girls and to imagine how their community might have responded to the strange and possibly even dangerous phenomenon in their midst beyond a letter written by the doctor who treated the sisters I could find little information about the case my story is an imaginative response to the situation. And I try to weave in details, true details from the period that felt stranger than fiction. So the way she is bumping up the age of reason and enlightenment, but then also bringing in contemporaneous reports is fascinating. Brilliant. The one thing I've been thinking about a lot, and Emily, I think you are the genesis of this idea, which is I'm totally comfortable calling this a fable, right? But what is the moral? What is the takeaway from this book? This isn't necessarily something as clear cut as the tortoise in the hare, but what is it? I think that a good segue to our spoiler section But before we pivot there are there any last things we want to say to our spoiler listeners Read the book Quickly You have about five minutes Perfect. So I do want to mention actually before we do that, the climate, the atmosphere. Because Jimona, you mentioned the climate allegory. Can you tell us more about that? Zen and B Purvis links the two very explicitly, very early on. You know, it's so hot that people can't think. They're miserable. They, I think, probably are remembering what it's like to be hungry. They see the river shrinking. There's a moment when the water is receding, obviously, from the banks, and you're in this silty, mucky, weird kind of interstitial period between the full river and a dried up river. And they find a sturgeon, and they're like, what is this monster? And it turns into this obscene, almost pagan, it's disturbing. It's a horrifying scene of them descending and tearing apart and at one point smashing the sturgeon's head. Yeah. And leaving it outside the Mansfield gates. And it allows us early on to see how the sisters, the Mansfield sisters who are there, act differently, do not conform, do not participate in this violence, but actually are trying feebly to roll the sturgeon back into the water. They're not going along with this. There's also a scene in the same scene where we see Pete Darling sort of flexing his power over them by pausing in the middle of the transport that Anne just says, fine, I'll walk. And the river is shallow enough for her to do that, but mucky and mired. And she steps off the ferry and wades the rest of the way to shore. And in what I saw as an explicit throwback to Elizabeth Bennet, walking across the field of muck in Pride and Prejudice. I love that connection. Yeah, and there's a way in which the climate, the river, the drought is a critical plot point, but also a symbol. It changes the power dynamics of everyone. The town is, as you pointed out, Jumana, frustrated about just the heat and then also the loss of agency and industry and movement. But yet the climate also, that change has empowered these girls in a way. Reading this made me think of a meme I saw related to The Great Gatsby. This summer, it was so hot this past summer. So hot. And I saw a tweet that said, oh, I understand The Great Gatsby now. Sometimes it does get so hot that you just want to fight. And like in this, it gets so hot. And the villagers are feeling frustrated and powerless. And they want to exert power in another way. And they take it out on these girls. The fourth word of the novel is infernal. It's hellish heat. At the same time, before the heat descends, there are such lush natural descriptions. I think they really hooked me. And I noticed Xenobie Purvis thanks an expert in her acknowledgments on the flora and fauna of the River Thames, probably in the 1700s, which I show clearly this was all research. I wanted to read you guys just two sentences from this is early on when Robin, the local village boy, walks by the Mansfields farm. And this is what he sees. his first impression, oh no, I'm sorry, this is Thomas, Thomas. He's been directed to the farm by Robin. And Thomas says his first impression was of abundance. Everywhere he looked was urgent fruitfulness, dog roses blooming around the door, foxgloves pressing up against the walls, a kitchen garden choked with carrots, lettuces, and climbing beans. A cow was tied to the fence, its udders veined and straining. Six white kittens played in the lush border nearby. that is the farm in all of its sort of innocence and glory before hell breaks loose, before the chaos. And I guess I'm with MJ in seeing what happens as the nature kind of crisps and fries and withers as deeply symbolic of this malevolence that's let loose. And it leads us to some terrible places that we will dive into in just a moment. We'll be right back. This is A.G. Sulzberger. I'm the publisher of The New York Times. I oversee our news operations and our business. But I'm also a former reporter who has watched with a lot of alarm as our profession has shrunk and shrunk in recent years. Normally, in these ads, we talk about the importance of subscribing to The Times. I'm here today with a different message I'm encouraging you to support any news organization that's dedicated to original reporting If that's your local newspaper terrific, local newspapers in particular need your support If that's another national newspaper that's great too And if it's the New York Times we'll use that money to send reporters out to find the facts and context that you'll never get from AI That's it Not asking you to click on any link Just subscribe to a real news organization with real journalists doing firsthand, fact-based reporting. And if you already do, thank you. And we're back. This is the Book Review Podcast. I'm MJ Franklin. I'm with Jumana Khatib, Greg Coles, and Emily Akin, and we're discussing The Hounding by Zeneby Purvis. Before we jump back to our conversation in the studio, I wanted to share some reader comments. We have an article up on the New York Times headlined, Book Club, Read the Hounding by Zena B. Purvis with the book review, and we've been talking about the novel with readers all over the world. Here are a few thoughtful comments. Wondering from New York writes, Compact, fast-moving, and engrossing, arriving at a perfect moment. The novel exposes the everyday misogyny facing women, particularly those who fail to conform to prevailing norms, as well as the ultimate dangers of toxic masculinity, groupthink, and the risks inherent in failing to assuage a fragile male ego. Sarah from Mountain View pointed out the climate element. She writes, I know that this book gets the most attention for its portrayal of the treatment of young women, echoes of the crucible, etc. abound. However, I also think that you could see this as a climate novel, or at the very least, a weather novel. The events occur over a long period of drought. It is a terribly hot, dry summer. Crops are withering. The ferryman has no work as the river has run dry. Everyone is on edge. And this hysteria finds its culprits through the ferryman's tale that the girls are becoming dogs. Somehow this insane idea is believed and spreads to the fevered brains of the community who need to find some explanation for the unnatural weather and targets for their anger. So that's the climate element. And then Vicky from Idaho writes, the novel serves as a powerful reminder of how easily communities can turn against their own members when difference is perceived as danger. Those are just a few snippets of comments. I urge you to dive into the full conversation online. A big thank you to everyone who's read with us and a big thank you to everyone who's commented. And okay, now back to our conversation in the studio. So we're leaving spoiler-free territory. We're going to dive into the second half of the book and everything's on the table. I'm going to do a reset. I'm just going to list off some things that happened in the second half of the book. So we have this rumor, the girls turn into dogs. It gets started by Pete who swears he saw the girls, even though the town knows Pete is a drunk and a liar. Somehow the story starts to catch on. It starts spreading around. And that's what we spend a lot of the second half watching. We watch how Robin, one of the local boys, who's actually sympathetic to the girls slowly starts to doubt and then believe we see how the local vicar visits the farm see the girls and then he starts to believe joseph the girl's grandfather and then thomas don't believe per se but they do lock the girls on the house because they're he's they're saying that they're going to protect them but that's also poisoning them this all culminates on pete's wedding day with a tragedy with that reset out the way, what did you make of it? Were there any character arcs that stood out? Did it stick the landing? What do you think the moral was? Now I'm just throwing up broad questions. I was relieved that temperance faltered. That was one of my favorite scenes. It had been alluded to that part of her distaste for alcohol was that she had seen alcoholism up close and she was disgusted by it that she even wore like kid skin gloves when she was pouring pints. And something happens. Like, she really was going out of her way to keep herself from being contaminated, physically contaminated. And at first you think it's just a sort of moral posture, but she gets some alcohol on her skin or her finger falls into a... I think Pete dunks her hand into the glass. Pete is truly terrible. And I think Pete knows that temperance has also been the one trying to temper the villagers' response to the girls. She's been the one urging them to, oh, no, they're just girls. You're giving them too much credit. And even though in the back of her own mind, she can see how it could happen. But even still, her like public position is that we should give the girls the benefit of the doubt. So Pete is obviously no stranger to the pub, dunks her hand in ale. And it's like she herself has this transformation into this rabid, like need. It's like the werewolf moment, right? Or a vampire moment where it's like she is consumed with a desire for alcohol. But interestingly, rather than leading her to commit brutal violence, she is uninhibited. And then she floozies her way. in the village, like, hey guys, what's up? Her husband is shocked. It's a temperance, have you been drinking? She actually does commit an act, a very brave act, and saves the life of someone who's, of Thomas, who's been accused or has actually volunteered his guilt for killing Pete Darling, even though he is not the one who did kill Pete Darling. He's the one who will presumably hang for it, except temperance intervenes and enables him to escape, which we have to believe is an act of courage that took a couple pints. Using, by the way, a razor clam from the dried up Thames. That's right. I forgot about that. God. I think it's easier to distill an overarching moral, even just from temperance, which is that it's possible to even leverage your own weakness and still come out with some courage or to do the right thing, or that falling to temptation or succumbing to temptation is not necessarily a sort of fait accompli. And I think that was remarkable to see. And she's a female character who's like by far the best at managing herself. And the girls themselves are by far the wisest characters in the book, even though we don't know what's going on in their head. Let's talk about that a little bit, the girls themselves, because Emily, you pointed out the idea of ambiguity. We hear these rumors. We don't know what's going on in the girl's head. And we don't know truly, are they able to turn into dogs or not? A lot of different people see different things. Temperance doesn't believe that she's trying to stop the rumor, but even she's like, those girls are weird. But weird is not the same thing as demonic turning into dogs. So let's talk about that. Can we talk about the girls and just the ambiguity in the book overall? Well, I guess I want to say on my first reading, I was so fixated on how to understand this book. Is it just purely symbolic? Are the dogs sort of an allegory for female empowerment and freedom? And that I missed, and I'm blushing, I'm an obtuse reader. I missed this whole other level of plot, which is alluded to, and the reader has to piece it together because different observers see pieces of scenes about which they do not know what to make. And they overhear little bits of dialogue. So something happens. On a dark night on the way home, Anne and Elizabeth Mansfield are walking together. Robin hears barking. He returns, rushes back to where he last saw these girls. He doesn see them He sees Pete Darling emerge walking down the road and instinctively he hides in the ditch or behind a bush He doesn want to be seen by Pete Something has happened And we get little hints about what that may have been. And I did not think about those until I read the book the second time. Same. We can blush together. The implication is that he's assaulted the girls, correct? But it's unclear to what extent or to what extent he was able to. who he himself never alludes to it again, except to say, there was something weird last night. I saw them change. And that's when Robin hears the barking. Very just glancing and only alluded to. I mean, she presumably, Xenobie Purvis knows the answer, but it leaves it to you to kind of reach your own conclusions. One interesting thing, though, is also the girls the next day, at this point, you're in Joseph's. Joseph's the grandfather who's going blind, and he's lying down and he overhears the girls talking. And they're whispering about, oh, can we stop them? Can we stop it or whatever? Which makes it seem like something recurring has happened, not just that event that night. You're not getting all the information. Later in the book, Joseph warns them, there are people who want to hurt you. And Anne says, don't you think we know that? None of this would need to happen if they didn't. Right. So it's different characters seeing just little slivers and getting little slivers of ambiguous information. Thomas is in the cherry orchard picking cherries and Elizabeth is crying and Anne is consoling her and says, don't you trust me? Just forget about it. All will be well or something like that. And so it took me two reads to make connections. So given all of us, I want to loop back to your question, Jumana. What's the moral? What's the takeaway? How are you regarding this? And especially the exit, the denouement of the book. The common denominator in this reading is Pete, that Pete is the corruptible force. He's so potent that he can be corruptible. And there's even something in The Ferryman, which is like taking you from one point to another. Regardless of whether his assault is what changes the girls, I'm struggling for the right word there. He's the one that still changes in the mind of the village. I love that point about the ferryman, which I had not connected the dots of, yeah, the ferryman ushers you from point A to point B. Maybe this is an obvious thing that I just didn't think about, but that's exactly what Pete is and who he does. That's a great point. I guess for me, just to be really crude, I think the moral of the story is that the dog in the book is Pete, not the girls. Well, and also this is why this book works so well on all these different levels with climate and misogyny. But obviously Pete is very concerned about the river drying up because that's his livelihood. But it's also maybe an allegory for fearing his own impotence. If he doesn't have the ability to be the change agent, then he's like totally ineffectual then, right? His father-in-law doesn't respect him. Exactly. Nobody respects him, really. The girl, Mansfield girls, that's what galls him. Even the Mansfield girls, these children don't respect him. Yeah. But I do want to complicate the idea that he's the dog, not the girls. Because I think the girls are— I just wanted to say that. Because I agree. I think he's the dog, one of the dogs. But I think the girls are, in their way, dogs as well. In that they're wild and they're free. And they're feral. And they're unconstrained. And they're so happy. I think some of the other characters talk about how they make their jokes. and how it looks like chatter. There's a scene when Thomas first arrives at the farm that just reminded me of the sound of music and the pine cone left on Maria's chair when she sits down to dinner as a little prank, where Hester tells Thomas that a kitten has fallen down the well and she makes him climb down after it to save it. And there's no kitten down there. And she's giggling off. She leaves him down there to climb his way out of the well. And it just shows the free spiritedness and the wildness of these girls. Yeah. And I kind of like that aspect. That's part of the ambiguity. Of course, being free and weird does not mean that you transform into dogs, but there's a way in which these girls are empowered and targeted for it. And they note that. I think which sister says it. There's a passage of dialogue where one of the sisters says, wherever we go, however we behave, there will always be something to drive us inside. That's where people want us to be. We went out when we weren't supposed to. We were too free. And this, all of this is our punishment. It has nothing to do with the idea of us becoming dogs and everything to do with the fact of us being girls. You talk about things being on the point and you ask for a moral. Zeneby Purvis is giving you the moral right there. Yeah. But delivered in such a good way. I love this book so much. I love this book so much. But before we pivot out, are there any last things that you want to mention? We have not even revealed who the real killer is, but maybe we shouldn't. Yeah, save that. Yeah. Read the book. Read the book. In the meantime, we have other book recommendations. After readers have finished The Hounding, I'm curious, what would you recommend they pick up next? And that could be for whatever reason. Maybe there is another book about a group of girls and the town thinks they're demonic. Maybe there is a book about a dog that you super love. Maybe there is a historical and allegorical novel. It could be for whatever reason. But what would you recommend readers pick up next? I'm going to go to you first, Greg. Sure. I'm going to recommend that readers go back 25 or 30 years ago to another debut novel by a woman named Emily Barton. The name of the book is The Testament of Eves Gundren. Eves is Y-V-E-S. And it is another beautifully written, very imaginative debut novel that plays with the contrast between modernity and kind of superstition. It is set, you originally think, in early, probably the 16th century or something. But there are little signs that it might not be an airplane flying overhead. And it's told by an anthropologist visiting this village that is frozen in time. And it is playful and ambiguous and inventive and playing with big ideas. This sounds so extremely my jam. I like the idea of these little blips that shouldn't be. I'm excited to read that. What about you, Emily? I'm going to take us back even further in time to a book that was published in 1850, but set during the Puritan era. And that is The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It is one of my favorite novels. I think it's practically a perfect novel. And I kept thinking of it while reading The Hounding, not only for thematic reasons, the emphasis on small town groupthink in The Scarlet Letter, it's the Puritan groupthink, but really the way both authors, Purvis and Hawthorne, use symbolic topography. So the way in The Scarlet Letter, the town is laid out and that the subversive Hester Prynne is punished by being put in the forest. Her hut is a little outside the town, down a forest path, just as little Nettlebed is circumscribed by, I purpose says this so beautifully, the green silk ribbon of the River Thames, and that the ferry takes you across to what is really civilization, the tavern and then the road with the, I guess, the carriage to the rest of England. Greater Nettlebed. Greater Nettlebed. And then the world beyond. And so The Scarlet Letter, a wonderful book if you haven't read it. I read it in school and would like to revisit it, especially after this. So I don't, not that we're competing here, but I do win because my book is set in an even earlier time period. This is Rivka Galchen wrote like a great parable of moral panic, like maybe four and a half or five years ago, appropriately called Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch. It is set in 1600s Germany. And there's, I'm so sympathetic to like older kooks in fiction. I just, I love them. So there's an older widow who's she's illiterate, but she's also a very skilled herbalist, which I think almost certainly means an abortionist. And, you know, so, you know, there's that. Basically, she's the subject of a tremendous and fast moving rumor mill. And the tone of this one is different than the hounding. There's there's a lot of humor in this. I mean, it's sort of like gallows humor because, you know, we kind of know how this is going to end. Whereas I think the hounding is a little more melancholic. And so they're written in a different register, but they have a lot in common. The shifting viewpoints and the sort of bigger points about groupthink. And it's just, it's fun. It's actually, believe it or not, fun. And they describe a character in there as looking like a cabbage. And I think about that pretty often. I love that. Yeah. Readers, go check it out. I have a few recommendations. First is a book that I don't know if I've mentioned on the podcast because I definitely have mentioned it everywhere I can. So I can't remember like, oh, did I mention it here or here? That book is Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff. This is one of my favorite books. Lauren Groff is one of my favorite authors and it's a story collection. And throughout that collection, there's a recurring theme about the accepted mistreatment of women and girls. The first story in that book, for instance, is called Lucky Chao Fun, which is about a small Massachusetts town that discovers that there is a sex trafficking ring being run out of the local Chinese restaurant. But instead of getting angry at the perpetrators, the town turns on the Chinese immigrant girls who are being trafficked. And so that theme runs throughout that collection. And it's just one of my favorite books. the other one that I have that's a little bit tonally different but if you want a literary novel about a town that will believe whatever they want to believe about a group of women gotta read paradise by Toni Morrison that also starts off similarly with this kind of prologue of women being run out of the town and then you flashback to figure out what's happened so good and then last but not least this isn't a book it's a podcast but if you want gossip but for fun. I recommend the podcast Normal Gossip in which a host takes submitted gossip, anonymizes it, and then recounts it to a guest, frequently comedians, other writers, and you just like kiki over this gossip. And it is so good. Even the episode titles, I'm going to list some of my favorites and they should give you a hint of the tone. Spot the Scammer, which is about a group of college friends who go on an East Asia trip before graduation. That one is wild. Maybe they're not in college. Maybe they're in grad school. There's essential oils and illegal casinos. That one is so fun. And then also Righteous Lesbian Energy. You will find frequently in this podcast, the villains are the homeowners associations. Very frequently. But it's just like fun and gossip for good. And if you tie it back to a book, the original host of the show, Kelsey McKinney, wrote a book called You Didn't Hear This From Me, which is like a socio-historical literary deep dive into gossip. It's so good. So those are my recommendations. And I think, unfortunately, that's all the time that we had. Greg, Jumana, Emily, thank you so much. I had a howling. Good time. And as promised, the title of our February Book Club book. In February, we will be reading and discussing Wuthering Heights. Emily Bronte's classic of Love and Revenge is being adapted into a new film by Emerald Fennell. And you know, we love a classic here at the book review. And we thought Wuthering Heights is back. Let's talk about it. We'll be discussing the book on the podcast that airs on February 27. We will also be chatting about the book online. Right now, we have up on the New York Times article headlined book club, read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte with the book review. Leave a comment and join the conversation there. We can't wait to discuss this novel with you. And in the meantime, happy reading.