The Hounding

The Hounding is a novel by the British writer Xenobe Purvis, published in 2025. It is set in a village in the English countryside and draws on the history of witchcraft accusations rather than on the supernatural as a settled fact.

The Mansfield girls have never been popular in Little Nettlebed: they are thought odd, and a little too pleased with themselves, and the village has always had plenty to say about them. What changes is that people start hearing dogs, that somebody claims to have seen the sisters transform, and that the story spreads through a community already given to reading omens into the ordinary world. The novel is told from the point of view of five villagers in turn, so the reader gets the evidence as a set of competing accounts rather than as a single witness, and each of the five has reasons of their own for what they say. Belief in witchcraft may be fading, but the distrust of anyone different is not, and the book is about how a village decides what a woman is.

The novel is set in the past and belongs to the tradition of British rural horror in which the threat is the community rather than the accused, and it was widely reviewed as a debut.