Texas Monthly | May 10, 2021
It should come as no surprise that May Cobb’s new novel, The Hunting Wives, begins with a dead body. If thrillers promise us anything, it’s blood. The East Texas native’s second novel, out this month from Penguin, joins a growing cadre of books by Texas women writers who are bending genre conventions to reveal the harder edges of the world—including Attica Locke, who uses the detective story to explore being Black in rural Texas, and Amy Gentry, who uses the art of suspense to illuminate female trauma. Because are women not always in danger? Because is being Black in America not a constantly unfolding horror story? When you frame it that way, suspense and horror just seem fitting.
Where, exactly, does The Hunting Wives fit into this? Well, it’s complicated. The lipstick-and-bullet-casings cover and the promo copy (“sultry, salacious, and utterly unpredictable”) make it clear that one of the book’s primary goals is to be a steamy good time, with plenty of sex, drugs, guns, and oil money. The narrator, Sophie O’Neill, has recently left her job as a lifestyle editor at a magazine in Chicago to move with her family to a small town in rural East Texas. As one does. But gardening, parenting, and hashtagging her new “slow” life on social media aren’t cutting it for Sophie, and she becomes embroiled in a secret women-only shooting club revolving around the rich, beautiful, and possibly dangerous Margot Banks. Cue the sex, drugs, and guns.
The Hunting Wives vaguely gestures toward feminism, but rather than using the genre to take on the patriarchy, it is really just a thriller that takes women’s relationships seriously—the complicated ways they love and betray and protect one another. And that is radical in its own way.
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