![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/vweisfeld.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/Victorian-Psycho.jpg?resize=584%2C887&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\nVirginia Feito\u2019s new gothic thriller, Victorian Psycho<\/a><\/em>, has attracted the attention of readers and commentators for its originality, as well as for its in-your-face macabre violence. It\u2019s graphic. It\u2019s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial killer. She doesn\u2019t murder at a discreet distance, either. No poison here. When toward the end of this short book (190 pages) she tells you she\u2019s holding a cleaver, well, you know . . .<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s 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 \u201cnaughty\u201d) 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014something you justknow won\u2019t turn out well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You gradually assemble a sort of understanding of Winifred\u2019s 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\u2019 school, but after The Incident (which I\u2019ll leave you to discover on your own), she was returned home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014prone to biting or licking or sucking on various objects and people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s mind. It\u2019s gory, but good. The book is being made into a feature film<\/a>, scheduled for release next year, starring Maika Monroe, Thomasin McKenzie, and Jason Isaacs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Virginia Feito\u2019s 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\u2019s graphic. It\u2019s bloody. And in this book, the first-person narrator is the serial … Continue reading