Book Review: Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

You’ll rarely encounter a book more aptly titled than Virginia Feito’s Victorian Psycho. If you ever wondered what it would be like if a female version of Patrick Bateman existed in Austenian England you are in for a treat as Feito pulls no punches, focusing on an antihero whose savage commentary is rivaled only by her violent tendencies. Already being turned into a movie by A24, this is a new satirical horror classic.

After opening with an illustration of a stately country manor captioned, “In three months everyone in this house will be dead,” we are introduced to Winifred Notty, who has just been hired on as the new Governess of Mr. and Mrs. Pounds’ two children, bratty golden child Andrew and neglected Drusilla. She has a general disdain towards her fellow humans, but especially towards the British upper class and their offspring, which would make her seem a poor candidate for the position, but she manages to convince her employers otherwise.

As Winifred’s past is revealed in drips and drabs, we quickly begin to suspect that she is more dangerous than she wants to let on and that her arrival at Ensor House is no coincidence, though she mostly manages to maintain her composure as the Christmas holiday approaches. The Pounds are hosting a sizable group of their upper crust friends and their families this year and want everything to be perfect, but Winifred may have other plans in mind.

Told from Winifred’s perspective we are privy to her thoughts as she experiences life with her new employers and they are hilariously scathing, doubly so when she inadvertently lets one escape from her lips. When describing Mrs. Pounds she notes, “The lines on her sallow forehead seem to be mating to beget more lines.” Over dinner, when asked about children she lets slip, “Can we honestly proclaim that they’re any better than their insufferable adult counterparts?”

Even when the horror truly kicks in towards the novel’s end it still carries a sardonic wit. At least as Winifred has described them, one would be hard pressed to think of a group that, if not necessarily deserving of their fates, aren’t exactly deserving of better either. Laced through with unsubtle rage at society’s disdainful treatment of women and members of the so-called lower class, both then and now, there’s some meat to the madness. Wickedly subversive, hilariously vicious, and highly entertaining this will likely go down as one of the year’s best books. ★★★★★