VORTICES: SHELBY HINTE'S
HOWLING WOMEN
a review by
Adam Van Winkle
“I did it. I shot James Dixon.”
The Sabine people were an ancient Italian tribe renowned for their fierceness in battle and resiliency.
The Sabine River serves as a large part of the Texas-Louisiana border. As such, it is the crossing into the Southwest.
What more fitting name then for a tough character escaping her present to confront her upbringing in New Mexico hurtling toward a fierce and violent act?
Sabine is in a spiral in Shelby Hinte’s Howling Women (out now from LEFTOVER Books). She’s left her husband and dumped her boyfriend and is heading toward the past and a reckoning with herself, having tried to bury the tragedy of “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.”
With writing that feels like something between Lucia Berlin’s brutally honest women and their tragedies and a hard luck Gillian Welch song, Hinte’s novel is immersive, gripping, damned good.
All along the way Sabine is telling us, writing this confession against her lawyer’s advice, that she isn’t worthy of love. In New Mexico she meets Howling Woman, something like a mystical, hippie with an almighty alias and a past of her own, and Angel, a man ready to show Sabine that she deserves better than she thinks. Strengthened through these relationships, Sabine is able to confront the causes of her emotional scars and kill the man most responsible.
There are trigger warnings here to be sure: domestic violence and sexual abuse are central to these characters and the plot. Sabine spares no details in telling how she gave James Dixon what he deserved for what he’d done to her.
But these are also what makes Sabine a hero worth rooting for. Especially in 2025, when abusers seem more empowered than ever, Sabine fights back.
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing cliched about the redemption story here. It’s real as hell. People are abused. People suffer in silence. Those closest to us don’t always help. People drink. Having been through all of this, Sabine is not suddenly right with the world for killing her abuser. But she’s on the way.
When Sabine gets to New Mexico, the locals in the bar joke with her about the place being a vortex, a mountain generated magnetic pull that brings people to the town and cleanses evil from the good. There's another vortex here of course. Howling Women is itself one, a clever and emotional and superb novel from the jump that will draw you in.
Shelby Hinte has accomplished something truly great here.
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