Hailie’s Reviews > The Hounding > Status Update

“He didn't believe in the vicar's nonsense, in hellfire or heaven, but he envied his certainty. What lay before Joseph was unknowable, a gape. It scared him. Yet lying here, on this summer afternoon, he soothed himself with a question: How bad could it be to be buried in the warm earth and listen to the world conduct itself around you? That didn't seem so dreadful. For a moment, the simmering fear subsided.”

“When he was among them, the hungry men, he had learned as best he could to disguise his gentleness [...] Some of them were God-fearing, but their main god, the one at whose temple they worshipped most frequently, was vio-lence. When they weren't committing violent acts—brawling in the alehouse or beating their wives—violence seeped into their lives in other ways. It inflected their language.”

“He had not done anything wrong, and yet here he was, ashamed. That was the cunning power of girls, he thought. They turned a strong man weak. They made a good man penitent.”