208 pages
Horror / Psychological Horror
February 2025
Liveright
https://amzn.to/3FIJsdm
Fonts used on cover appears to be ‘Table Wood’
Victorian Psycho was a book that I noticed while compiling the new release list for February 2025. The yellow colour of the cover jumped out at me with the use of a fitting scalloped font and the oil painted girl’s face. You may recall that I likened this to the cover of the film Incident in a Ghostland. The book and film are very different but have a similar tone because in both there is someone completely unhinged rampaging around a gorgeous cluttered Victorian mansion.
The back cover copy of this book made me think I would get some Shirley Jackson The Yellow Wallpaper feeling out of this, or maybe The Haunting of Hill House Netflix series style. Everything was quite different, but those herbs and spices ended up in the stew, let’s say.
I applied for a review copy and was sent an ebook for consideration, so as with every book I enjoy I will buy a physical copy eventually for my library. Typically, I do not apply to review or accept a review copy of a book unless I would buy it myself.
Naughty, Notty, knotty
Victorian Psycho covers about a year in the life of governess Winifred Notty as she moves into Ensor house to take care of her charges; Drusilla and Andrew Pounds. The Pounds family are extremely wealthy and have a gorgeous mansion in the English countryside. Winifred seems to be from somewhere nearby but a lower class village.
She has also had an extremely violent upbringing. Whether it be nature or nurture Winifred is a psychopath, the titular Victorian psycho.
From the back cover:
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House prepared to play the perfect governess—she will dutifully tutor her charges, Drusilla and Andrew, tell them bedtime stories, and only joke about eating children. But long, listless days spent within the estate’s dreary confines come with an intimate knowledge of the perversions and pathetic preoccupations of the Pounds family—Mr. Pounds cannot keep his eyes off Winifred’s chest, and Mrs. Pounds takes a sickly pleasure in punishing Winifred for her husband’s wandering gaze….
French tutoring and needlework are one way to pass the time, as is admiring the ugly portraits in the gallery… and creeping across the moonlit lawns…
Patience. Winifred must have patience, for Christmas is coming, and she has very special gifts planned for the dear souls of Ensor House.
So we follow Winifred from her point of view as she deals with children she does not like, a family she seems to resent, and a family that also treats her terribly. Whether she seems aloof or antagonistic or just unfit to be a governess we can’t quite tel at first: she does not seem to have the schooling or credentials required to raise children, let alone the actual desire to. As a horror novel, it absolutely works because it has beats placed within it that are twisted and gruesome yet compelling and this works to paint Winifred as a villain.
Much like its titular counterpart American Psycho there is some empathy in that we want to see how far this psycho will take it. We want to see if there is any semblance of humanity left within her. We wanted to see if Winifred Notty is there at all. So it also works as just a drama or tragedy or a literary exercise albeit a very dark one.
The Shining star here is…
The Shining Star here is Winifred herself. We spend all the book behind her eyes. Part of us may want to imagine her as The Governess from Turn of the Screw or a little Mary Poppins because of the time and setting; instead we are greeted with an extremely robust tanky woman who is overweight, unattractive by her own admission, unwashed so smelly, is intelligent and witty yet extremely warped and selfishly twisted. Winifred could change into a werewolf at any moment and it would be entirely expected.
I think the most interesting thing about Winifred is that she knows she is absolutely evil and unhinged and while not revelling in that cartoonishly, completely accepts herself. The most terrifying thing about Winifred is that you can see shades of this in people from history, real people and it stand to reason that there are real people like this walking amongst us right now. Yet she seems like a really interesting person who would be insanely fun at parties.
The rest of the dreary dearies
Next to our main character who we kind of fall into a love-hate relationship with because she is utterly insane and horrible and cannibalistic and vile yet highly entertaining; is the opulent setting of Victorian England. I think that the theme and the setting play hand in hand here because we are told this sort of like a stream-of-consciousness diary entry — of course diaries were all the rage in the 19th century — and we can easily picture one of the Brontë sisters keeping a journal to this effect.
There was probably a lot more untapped and undocumented dark Insanity going on in this age than at any other time. It was an Information Age, recall, so people were getting many warped ideas from the news and overseas for the first time while still having the grotesquery of animal slaughter, near-primitive medical practice, and sky high infant mortality at their very feet.
Many of the conventions related to Victorian England and mansions specifically are present in this book like rolling countryside surrounding a desolate, claustrophobic mansion of epic proportions. It’s labyrinthian so people can go off into any wing or floor of the house and get away with murder within hours if not weeks before anyone discovers what they have done. Creeping around in the dark with a candle wearing a nightgown is a regular occurrence. The barn, the pigs sty, the kitchen and the nursery itself all add this air of dank, stuffy stinky reality of the Victorian era. It was not all whale bone corsets and frilly lace there was manure and disease and rot and filth in every corner. Even their posh main course meals held a kind of demented sadism compared to a ploughman’s lunch. However, from the family portraits lining the long dark hallways and the sterling silver adorning a long dark dining table, this is an upper crust family so they are a little bit removed from the realities of the world, regardless. Which brings us back to Winifred Notty who is absolutely removed from reality in every way. This is a monster in human form that truly does whatever the hell she wants, be it in a hovel or a haven.
Salt, pepper, and the Pounds
Many other characters are well developed, but are little but insects to be crushed underfoot in the way of Winifred’s grand design. She is not just a psycho rambling past this family on a whim; there is something at play in her mind.
The children themselves are salt and pepper; a little girl who is a sweetie that everyone seems to adore that is gorgeous and like a porcelain doll and takes very feminine classes with her governess Andrew the little boy is a snot-nosed brat and he is interested in rooting about, getting into trouble and the educational equal of poking frogs with sticks and many boyish things and is the least interested in his studies.
There are servants and visitors who come and go, and some are quite interesting so while rounding out the cast of characters, everyone has their place. The wife of course, the lady of the house, wants to run a tight ship and would do a lot better if all of her family were actual cardboard cutouts. I’d say that Mrs Pounds is the least developed of all the characters; she’s just a jealous, petty woman.
Mr. Pounds is very interesting and we spend the most time with him after the children. He once in a while takes a morning constitutional, a little tramp around the grounds with Winifred and it is on those walks that we see there is some sort of plan afoot though we still cannot discern what it is.
Often the camera goes dark on these walks and while we do not think there’s anything untoward going on, it is just apparent that when Winifred and Mr Pounds go on these walks they get along well. This is rare because Mr pounds is a stuffed shirt of a man not very agreeable easily dislikable kind of grotesque pig-headed business person who only cares about acquiring and maintaining wealth and power but is also the laziest man in the novel, or perhaps all of England.
As mentioned the writing style is sort of a diary entry so we don’t really spend a lot of time getting to know these people outside of how they present themselves to Winifred and what she thinks of them. She’s a very intelligent person who has seen some things so her descriptions of these people are tainted by that.
Our lead character spends some time in the middle of the novel in a dank isolated grotesque and lonely area so I don’t want to get into exactly what that is to not give anything away but she does have a sort of rebirth moment in this book which is quite interesting and we see how her Insanity ramps up after that incident. It is a dark mirror of a final-girl arc in many ways.
We go between this sort of dry humor, dark humor, gallows humor if you will with pinpoint light of hopeful moments in the writing and then right back into some very matter of fact gore, grotesquery, and murder. That grotesquery has a little bit of everything tool there is a little self-mutilation and loathing, there is a lot of sick cruelty against children, there is a cannibalistic aspect and a disregard for animals, living or dead, so she just proves over and over again through this kinetic style that we could expect literally anything from this main character, let alone the plot.
It works really well to keep us interested page after page. I found this a very quick read, and I was very interested to see where it would go next anytime I took a break from reading because it was so unpredictable. Of course because this is a sort of diary entry each chapter is a self-contained story and I enjoy that. There is not a page that goes by where nothing happens. The pace is kept high and light because of the gripping and twisted way these stories are told. Even when we go back in time in a memory of Winifred’s, it’s short-lived, is extremely important to the story and always dark and disturbing. Unlike some flashback scenes, these are ones you will want to read.
Conclusion and comparisons
For readers that have sought the darkest of dark Victorian literature I think this would be a superb addition. The research and attention to detail about 19th century life are Illuminating and interesting. Of course it has modern element like a sophisticated worldview, modern pacing uses fairly genre language. This dance between dark disturbing and outright grotesque is something you would only find in contemporary literature. While it can be compared to a strange blend of Turn of the Screw, The Yellow Wallpaper and American Psycho, I think that there are also some film comparisons to be made with The Haunting of Hill House, the series Penny Dreadful and Crimson Peak. I absolutely enjoyed this book and it will seek previous books and forthcoming work from Virginia Feito. I listened to her interview on Talking Scared podcast, which was an interesting chat this Spanish-born author where we learn this is being made into a film right this very minute. A dark joy to read in a very cool tone, Victorian Psycho has been the most refreshingly sick books I’ve read so far this year.
As mentioned, I have that AI experiment using NotebookLM up for your perusal!
The post is here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/uncanny-valley-125510550
and the audio is here: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/0e6753b7-35f0-459d-836b-7349fc6fedbd/audio
Uncanny valley time!
✮✮✮✮✮✮
▹ Bookworm Central on Patreon ▹ https://www.patreon.com/typicalbooks
▹ Bookworm decor is here! ▹ https://shop.typicalbooks.com/
▹ All socials, the shop and news ▹ https://linktr.ee/LydiaPeever
▹ Read books I wrote ▹ https://amzn.to/3k20OY6
▹ A list of horror books out each month ▹ https://typicalbooks.com/newhorror
▹ Music by ænorex ▹ https://aenorex.com
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases when you use Amazon links here. While I accept very limited and specific books for review from publishers, my reviews are honest, and I only accept books I’d have bought with my own money.
I talk horror books; extreme horror, classic, slasher, gothic, and everything in between. Helping you find the next best horror book to read is the goal, and sharing new and old horror from my shelves and new releases is how! Horror, nonfiction and even true crime can be found here as I find that human beings are the scariest thing of all.
✮ Thank you! ✮