Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito
I would like to thank 4th Estate for an advance copy of this novella in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – 4th Estate
Published – Out Now
Price – £12.99 paperback
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect Victorian governess. She’ll dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But the longer Winifred spends within the estate’s dreary confines and the more she learns of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family, the more trouble she has sticking to her plan.
Whether creeping across the moonlit lawns in her undergarments or gently tormenting the house staff, Winifred struggles at every turn to stifle the horrid compulsions of her past until her chillingly dark imagination breaches the feeble boundary of reality on Christmas morning. Wielding her signature sardonic wit and a penchant for the gorgeously macabre
The Governess is an unusual character in media. They can be the Nanny in the vein of Mary Poppins restoring a family to health, they can be more tortured as in the case of The Turn of the Screw and occasionally the unsettling in many a horror story. The person allowed into a family to help bring order, a person you can trust with your children and possibly your secrets means they may know your vulnerabilities. Prepare though for a new type of Governess in the form of Winifred Notty who appears and seizes your attention by the first page in Virginia Feito’s new gothic tale of death and murder the very engaging Victorian Psycho.
In the 19th century the Pounds family have inherited an ancient rambling estate named Ensor House and moved from London with the ir two young children Drusilla and Andrew. They are going through governesses at a fast rate and three months prior to Christmas its time for a new one. Winifred Notty has experience with families and children but is not telling her employees everything as it’s a fresh start for her in many ways. Winifred wants to do well and not let any bad things happen but something things happen. In three months, everyone in the house will be dead.
We tend to think gothic as staid and moody with atmospherics and long silences, but you can dial it up a little and we move into the world of the gothic grotesque and the penny dreadfuls. Victorian Psycho is ramped up to the max and creates it own surreal reality where as Winifred’s confidant we both experience the strange world of the Pounds into which Winifred and her own unusual grasp on reality are colliding. Its an explosive mix and once we realise what Winifred is capable of means it is very hard to put this down all the way to what we know from just a few pages will maan a lot of death.
The star attraction is Winifred herself. She’s absolutely fascinating. She appears well educated, sarcastic, affable and then every few lines drops a line that makes you read again what she just said in her asides to you or to other characters. She can dress an insult to one of her employers just by smiling or acting as if she never said something. She gets the urge sometimes to just lash out or even something strange like lick the fingers of her sleeping charges. The more she talks we get the sense there are a series of strange incidents in her life, unusual keepsakes in her luggage means she both keeps us on edge and yet we like her! She is a woman of extreme passions in life, has a sense of humour and has her eye on a young maid who captures her fancy. Despite the book’s title she is more someone that death and murder seem to accidentally happen to as if she was caught unaware and then must then work out how to hide things. Usually a body. There is an incredibly dark comedic aspect to her even though she is a mass murderer in waiting.
That sympathy works because in the nicest way possible the Pounds family really don’t help themselves. The patriarch of the family measures Winfred’s head is delighted they share a skull size and makes unsubtle hints as his intentions; Mrs Pounds makes her displeasure to Winifred clear all the time and loves to keep the family servants on edge with the occasional weird punishment meted out. Winifred’s charges are sadly no better. The young Andrew is spoilt, demanding and has flashes of very unpleasant behaviour and Drusilla is simply expected to be a lady and yet despite her simpering is at 13 focused on a painter who has caught her eye. Its an explosive household that Winifred is the lit match thrown in with and that isn’t going to well at all for anyone…well except for us as the reader.
At a short length this allows us to follow quickly over three months Winifred’s employment, there are minor events that occasionally may or may not lead to murder (but rarely pre-planned) and then with the arrival of the Pounds’ even more horrible friends and family members for Christmas the finale awaits. By then we know what Winfred can be capable of and its just a question of what event will trigger things and how bad will things get. Reader…it gets BAD we go full on Sweeney Todd Penny Dreadful at the end and with an added reveal of family secrets that explains a few things there is a dark humorous feast of epic violence awaiting us and yet by the end there is a twinge of sadness that poor old Winifred was just trying to be good and saying that after the pile of bodies we find is an impressive thing to say.
Victorian Psycho is a gothic black comedy with a lot of horror that dares readers with how far the story can go and then pushes that little bit more. It has an Addams family style mix of the grotesque pictures and the words not always quite lining up with what happens. A world where upper class snobbery, stupidity and cruelty are getting matched by someone who is very much oblivious and yet more than capable herself of striking back without even knowing they have until they notice the bloody weapon they hold in their hands. You can have a lot of fun reading this but you may want to recheck the moral compass afterwards as no one was really hurt… were they? Highly recommended!
