Victorian Psycho

November 1, 2024
In this razor-sharp, fever dream of a novel, Feito (Mrs. March, 2021) delivers a wickedly entertaining twist on the Victorian governess tale, plunging readers into the unsettling world of Winifred Notty, a nanny with murderous tendencies. As Winifred steps into her role at Ensor House, she grapples with the tension between her dark nature and her new responsibilities, all while the family remains blissfully unaware of her true self. With a nod to Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho (1991), Feito blurs the boundaries between reality and Winifred's twisted perceptions, leaving readers questioning what's truly happening versus what exists solely in her mind. With visceral prose that often describes even ordinary scenes in terms of blood and gore, Feito's writing is as relentless as it is gripping, with occasional moments that break the fourth wall, pulling readers further into Winifred's deranged psyche. Bold, gory, and sharply humorous, Victorian Psycho is a daring dive into dark comedy and horror, a thrill ride for fans of gothic mayhem and psychological intrigue.

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November 15, 2024
A twisted, bloodthirsty governess celebrates Christmas with her new employers. Set in a stylized Victorian England, Feito's very different follow-up to the eerie, sophisticatedMrs. March (2021) is not for the faint of heart. It begins with the image of a manor, captioned: "In three months everyone in this house will be dead." Indeed they will, in scenes of gore, dismemberment, and gleeful murderous abandon, observed with wry detachment by the titular psycho herself. To wit: "I spit out the blood and see, as so often happens when one slits an infant's carotid artery, the baby is dead." Then, a new paragraph: "I have not thought this through." Thinking it through seems unlikely to have made much of a difference, though, as she packs the corpse up for mailing to a Benedictine nunnery in Lancashire with a note: "Sorry, here's another one." This misanthropic, sociopathic, compulsively wisecracking character, Winifred Notty of Hopefernon, claims upon her arrival at Ensor House to have hopes of keeping what she calls her "Darkness" in check. "Observing my clean, respectable image in the glass I open my mouth wide in an attempt to catch a glimpse of the Darkness within me, to spy it peeking out of me, slick and muscular and toothed, like a lamprey swallowed whole." But the awful Pounds family--pervy father, pathetic mother, drippy Drusilla, and her stupid little brother Andrew--along with the annoying household staff and a gaggle of repellent Christmas Day guests make restraint impossible. Miss Notty has a secret to reveal--and havoc to wreak. Where ironic horror and horrific irony meet, this unbridled madhouse of a novel dazzles like a bloody jewel.

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November 11, 2024
Feito (Mrs. March) unspools a bold and mordant gothic novel about a murderous governess. Winifred Knotty was born in Victorian England with an “evil soul,” according to her mother. Winifred’s stepfather, a reverend, regularly performed exorcisms on her as a girl, for macabre behavior such as collecting the corpses of murdered babies in their small village and arranging them on her shelves (“Good, now, I am cured,” she said disingenuously after one such exorcism). Eventually, she finds employment as a governess for the Pounds family at their estate on the moors, where she tells the two children that her previous charges “dropped dead.” According the book’s front matter, the Poundses don’t have long to live (“In three months everyone in this house will be dead,” reads a caption under a drawing of an estate; “Death everywhere. Death in the river, in the corpses floating upstream and down,” begins the preface). The novel’s perverse thrill is in slowly uncovering how and why the Poundses meet their fate. Along the way, Feito provides readers with searing glimpses of Winifred’s derangement (she bites into a raw chicken in front of the cook and pretends to be a ghost haunting the house). Fans of psychological horror will be enthralled.

Starred review from December 13, 2024

A murderous woman dropped into a gothic novel is a recipe for delightfully disturbing and grimly comedic bloodshed. Winifred Notty is the new governess at Ensor House, in charge of teaching and supervising children Drusilla and Andrew Pound, but Winifred is not a typical governess. She wanders the grounds at night barely clothed, subtly torments the staff and her charges, and at times displays a violent imagination. The Pound family, caught up in their own troubles, don't seem to understand the depth of Winifred's depravity until one Christmas when she shows them all. Feito (Mrs. March) evokes classic gothic storytelling in her writing and in the book's layout, which creates juxtapositions between the disturbing acts Winifred commits. Readers come to know Winifred's terrifying fantasies (and her willingness to indulge them), and when she finally snaps, and the body count rises exponentially, the horrors she commits feel like catharsis, as Feito has populated the novel with cruel and shallow upper-crust victims for her to dispatch. VERDICT Fans of gothic literature who don't mind gruesome deaths will savor watching Winifred go beyond simply eating the rich in this seemingly by-the-book gothic story that subverts some of the genre's conventions. It already has a film adaptation in the works.--James Gardner

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