Virginia Feito’s new gothic thriller, Victorian Psycho, has attracted the attention of readers and commentators for its originality, as well as for its in-your-face macabre violence. It’s graphic. It’s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial killer. She doesn’t murder at a discreet distance, either. No poison here. When toward the end of this short book (190 pages) she tells you she’s holding a cleaver, well, you know . . .

It’s also worth saying that much of it is highly comic, poking fun at the aristocracy and its Victorian-era pretensions. The heroine, Winifred Notty (which I invariably read as “naughty”) is posing as a governess and was hired to deal with the two children of the Pound family: Drusilla, an angsty teenager, and the young heir, William, insufferably puffed up with his future importance.

Their mother, a faded woman imprisoned by the constraints of her social situation, is unable to think beyond them. Though she senses something off about Miss Notty, she grabs hold of the wrong end of the stick when she believes the governess is trying to seduce her husband. Mr. Pound may actually be interested in being seduced—something you justknow won’t turn out well.

You gradually assemble a sort of understanding of Winifred’s background. She was illegitimate; her father refused to marry her mother. Her mother moved to another town and passed herself off as a widow, marrying a local Reverend who grew to think of his stepdaughter as the incarnation of evil. She was sent to a girls’ school, but after The Incident (which I’ll leave you to discover on your own), she was returned home.

The foods the Pound family is served are described in sometimes lascivious detail, as the governess perceives them. But then she has something of an oral fixation—prone to biting or licking or sucking on various objects and people.

I came to think of this story as akin to a gruesome fairy tale, in which all sorts of outlandish and grotesque occurrences are possible. You must decide for yourself how much is literally true and how much is in Miss Notty’s mind. It’s gory, but good. The book is being made into a feature film, scheduled for release next year, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs.