Xenobe Purvis’s debut novel is based on a fragment from a 1701 issue of “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,” which records “a great rumor spread to us that some young girls … in the Oxfordshire countryside had been seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.” Purvis has woven the fragment into a Shirley Jackson-like tale of rumor, paranoia, and persecution in the fictive village of Little Nettlebed, Oxfordshire.