Howling Women – Shelby Hinte

[Leftover Books; 2025]

In the 1890s, the work that catapulted Sigmund Freud to prominence was his assertion of the overwhelming frequency of childhood sexual abuse. He hypothesized that hysteria essentially proceeds from “one or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences which belong to the earliest years of childhood.” Freud’s study of hysteria compelled him to look deeper: to consider that hysteria itself wasn’t the full story, and was perhaps only a set of symptoms triggered by something darker.

However, after publishing these findings in a paper titled “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” Freud realized that the wealthy parents who paid his bills were likely implicated in the storm of sexual misconduct he’d uncovered, and his career might not continue if he didn’t prioritize their desires over those of the girls whose hysteria he listened to. So Freud reframed his findings to fit a different interpretation: less inflammatory, more financially advantageous. “Upon the wreckage of his greatest work,” Melissa Febos summarizes, “Freud proceeded to construct his theories of psychoanalysis.” Take, for example, the Oedipal complex: while it originally cast the girl as a victim of paternal abuse, we now understand it to refer to a girl inflamed with desire for her father figure. Freud’s new theories pathologized his patients, implying that something was wrong with them, not that something wrong had been done to them. 

Sabine, the narrator of Shelby Hinte’s debut novel, Howling Women, is one such woman. Self-doubt and shame have convinced her to keep what happened to her a secret for decades, never speaking of it to anyone, until it’s coaxed out of her by a new friend who goes by Howling Woman. “We do all kinds of crazy things trying to recover from the ways men hurt us,” Howling Woman says. “Worst of all is blaming ourselves.” 

The novel prioritizes curiosity over blame. Placing blame is what the law tries to do, Sabine asserts, “like such a thing can be done.” Sabine takes a different approach, empathetically considering her own actions and the actions of those around her. She’s interested in the story underneath the actions. 

So what is that story? Is it a story of hysteria, of women gone crazy for no apparent reason other than the congenital fissures of femininity? Or is this a story of abuse that stays with the abused, shaping her life in its imprint, while the man walks free? 

A story is determined by its starting point: a fact of narrative self-evident to Sabine. Howling Women is a confessional told while Sabine is out on bail, awaiting trial. “That’s how it works,” she tells the reader on the first page. “When you’ve shot a man.” But she doesn’t get around to recounting the shooting until another hundred and fifty pages later.

Over and over Sabine returns to narrative structure as she learned it in college, musing about Chekhov, Freytag’s Pyramid, and inciting incidents. “The law doesn’t care about the story,” Sabine says. “And the story is bigger than just the shooting. It goes back to our upbringings—mine and Howling Woman’s. It goes back to shitty stepfathers, mothers that let bad things happen to their children, and growing up in homes where you drink away your feelings before they ever reach the surface.” During the course of her narration, Sabine skates through time, revisiting her childhood during a brief stay at her mom’s house, reflecting on her recent affair while she fantasizes about a new flame. Sabine gropes for a sense of causal logic even as she admits that narratives shape sense out of the ambiguous swirl of human experience. “Truth and belief and storytelling all feel manmade,” Sabine says. “Like things designed to explain the unexplainable…The story is a way to make sense, but how do you make sense of an entire history?” That fragmented history unfurls one terse chapter after another. 

An unexpected pregnancy spurs Sabine to leave her husband and her lover, to get an abortion, and to fly from Berkeley, California, to her home state of New Mexico. After years of trying to distance herself from her desert town and working-class roots, Sabine shows up at her mother’s front door, returning to the house she left when she was eighteen. Her mother is an alcoholic who fancies herself an artist, a woman who abdicated all parental responsibilities to keep her child safe. Throughout the novel, Hinte depicts interactions with precision and specificity, making the scenes and settings distinctive and alive. Sabine notes, “I could smell the burn of vodka that permanently laminated her skin. Instinctively, I looked at my watch. Eleven forty-five in the morning. Old habits die hard, but none as hard as tracking the start time of your mother’s drinking to map your movements for the day.” Many of the habits Sabine resents in her mother have nonetheless taken up residence in her body as well. The incessant drinking. The tendency to sleep with unsavory men. Using both practices as ways of blunting the constant sting of existence. Yet “isn’t it human nature,” Sabine asks, “to want to take a break from reality every once in a while?” 

Staying at her mother’s house is anything but a break for Sabine. While she’s there, Sabine relays, “I woke in a panic I hadn’t felt since childhood.” What follows is a graphic description of childhood sexual assault. Sabine is a blunt narrator. She earns trust with the reader by naming whatever comes to mind, even though “[her] lawyer doesn’t think it’s a good idea.” Throughout the novel, Sabine debates her own agency, questioning how much she was shaped in the mold of what happened to her, and how much she can leave her abuse, untouched and unexamined, in the past. The novel repeatedly asks if we can get away from what’s been done to us. Sabine tries: she catches a cheap bus out of town.

“My getaway bus broke down,” she recounts, “north of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.” After getting stranded on the side of the road, our plucky anti-heroine surveys a panoramic view of jagged mountains surrounding a flat basin. The valley seems to pull her in: a mystical phenomenon locals call “the vortex.” Unwilling to wait for the next bus, Sabine wanders into the valley, to the fictional town of Yu, and straight into the Whiptail, Yu’s only bar. Her life repopulates with townies: Nick, the bartender; Angel, the brooding, mysterious love interest; and the Janis Joplin-esque Howling Woman. 

Once Sabine arrives in Yu, she falls into the protective care of Howling Woman, who is both sisterly and motherly, a kind of avatar for a woman no longer motivated by the interest of men. Sabine’s narration alternates between her developing life in Yu and flashbacks to her life in California and before. She examines the holes in her marriage to David, a somewhat dull art professor who teaches at UC Berkeley. She recounts how she cheated on him with a much-older coworker at the gastropub where she waitressed, how her lover was better at fucking her in the ways she wanted to be fucked, even while she questioned if she was wrong to want coarse, demeaning sex. “I wanted to explain myself,” Sabine says, about the singular time she asked David to speak roughly to her during sex and he refused. “But also, I wanted to try and analyze why I was like that,” she continues, “like if I could explain my desire, it wouldn’t be so offensive.” This is one of the radical aspects of Howling Women: the legitimacy that the novel confers on “the complexity of desire.” Sabine rejects the suggestion that all of her desires surrounding sex are because of the abuse she experienced, “but I don’t think it is totally removed from it either,” she says. “Maybe I just like the way pain enhances pleasure.” 

But Howling Woman has a different idea of how to find satisfaction. “There isn’t any better feeling in this world,” she tells Sabine, “than getting even with a bad man.” This sets Sabine on her new trajectory: revenge. For most of her life, Sabine has been living with the consequences of an unfathomable violation. And Howling Woman pushes her to finally do something about it. Something other than pretend it didn’t happen, something other than to try and act like she’s whole when someone took something from her so long ago that she’s had to live off the leftovers of her personhood ever since.

The book wants to know, with a desperate and furious urgency, who will do anything to defend women. One of the novel’s central questions is how to respond to crimes that will not be punished or pursued by the American legal system. Howling Woman is distinguished by her willingness to fight back, her willingness to raise her voice and howl in the face of a system that is silent about violence done to women and girls. 

Sabine and Howling Woman set out on the road with a gun in the glove compartment. In this way, Howling Women becomes not just about violence against women and girls, but about the nature of revenge and violence as a means of social change. Is an act of violence against another individual ever justified? This question echoes throughout the novel and into the world beyond—rippling all the way into a recent dinner party I attended, when my husband brought up Luigi Mangione. 

The host of the party—a software engineer whose counter I was sitting on—grimaced. “That man was a father,” the software engineer said. He meant Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthCare CEO Mangione is charged with murdering. 

The software engineer could only see the most explicit act of violence. His class allegiance prohibited him from recognizing the antecedent acts of violence, UnitedHealthCare’s refusals of coverage. But class allegiance isn’t the only factor that determines our recognition of various harms. We are collectively conditioned to criminalize violence that attacks the powerful and to ignore and passively accept the everyday violences that exist within the system. Certain violences sustain the system, while other violences interrupt it and call attention to its flaws. Mangione’s alleged crime is one of the latter. The harms enacted and enabled by Thompson and the health insurance industry are among the former. 

Sabine’s crime is one that attacks the powerful and the complacent. Even while Sabine is firing the gun, she feels the limitations of her position, how little the structure of society allows her to enact meaningful revenge. “I’m just another hysterical bitch in the sitcom of his life,” she says. “The only way to gain power with a man like that is to take every ounce of power they have away from them. I think that’s what Howling Woman intended me to learn. She knows the rules of civilized society aren’t enough to deal with bad men. They were designed by men.” 

The police come. They pull over Howling Woman, make the women get out of the car, throw Sabine against the ground. When Sabine makes it back to the Whiptail, she’s got a cut on her face that makes her look like a victim of domestic violence. Sabine’s first experience upon getting out of jail is having her story disbelieved and then dismissed. “There it was,” she says, “the judgment I was always afraid of, that my feelings and impulses wouldn’t be valid, that I wouldn’t be believed, that I was just a hysterical woman unable to control my emotions.” Defeat blares off the page. If nothing else, these acts of extrajudicial violence—what Sabine does in Howling Women, the acts of revenge Howling Woman committed years before, and the murder of Brian Thompson, UHC CEO—command attention. They illustrate how broken our systems are—and how broken our systems have been, since the days of Freud and before. 

The novel strives to provide a clear-eyed depiction of what life is like for women under the patriarchy. But the novel stops short of depicting that the patriarchy is not a single unilateral structure—it’s a framework of power that intersects in complicated, compounding ways with other systems that govern our society, resulting in the multi-pronged oppressive context that bell hooks called “the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Howling Woman is a singular, powerful story that forces readers to reflect on what one’s options are. What would a society that actually protected women, children, and other vulnerable populations look like? Howling Women doesn’t provide answers, but it illustrates what might happen if we can’t collectively find some. 

McKenzie Watson-Fore serves as the executive editor for sneaker wave magazine and the inaugural critic-in-residence for MAYDAY. She holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Offing, Bridge Eight, Christian Century, and elsewhere. She can be found at MWatsonFore.com or drinking tea on her back porch.