Book Review: Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito

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“Human expressions are like hides I’ve peeled throughout life, rolled into a ball, and slipped under my skin.”

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Winifred Notty’s new position takes her to Ensor House, home to the Pounds family, where she’ll be in charge of educating, molding, and entertaining her young charges. While she appears to be the ideal governess, her cheerful, agreeable veneer cloaks twisted thoughts and sinister compulsions. And as she comes to know the family’s contemptible and perverse preoccupations, she finds suppressing her dark predilections increasingly difficult, and reality and fantasy begin to blur as she struggles to maintain the façade.

Victorian Psycho is an immaculately gruesome, sublimely macabre, blackly hilarious, gleefully bloody train wreck from which the reader can’t look away. The sardonic tone is darkly delightful, conveying grisly Victorian era realities and atrocities with levity, producing a devious and witty satire of the time period’s shortcomings, money-fueled airs and inequities, and abysmal conditions, including (but not limited to): rampant filth, ignorance, poverty, degradation, illness, death, murder, abuse, brutality, tragedy, and suffering; deplorable societal rules and expectations; clearly demarcated class and gender divisions; toxic beauty regimes and deadly décor and fashion trends; archaic medical care; and the list goes on.

People are literally the worst, and experiencing their abominable actions and abhorrent personalities from Winifred’s detached yet bloodthirsty and scathing point of view is exasperating, depressing, nightmarish, and utterly fantastic. And as the story probes deeper into her damaged psyche and exposes her devastating backstory, surprising sense of self-awareness, and true motives, her chilling behavior incites an interesting exploration of nature and nurture, fear and rage, resentment and vengeance, appearance and truth, and manipulation and lies, cementing this period as miserable, sad, and outright horrific.

Grotesque imagery and extreme violence abound, balanced out by lovely, occasional black-and-white illustrations coupled with pointed quotations, diverting fourth-wall breaking, gallows humor, and marvelously lurid gothic elements. This unique fusion descends into unfettered chaos and carnage that’s as horrifying as it is cinematic and cathartic, leading to an examination of who the actual “psychos” are, as, per society’s dictates, there are acceptable means and modes of conduct, and an individual must possess the proper identity, capital, title, and connections in order to survive, engage in cruelty and barbarity of the covert persuasion, and, ultimately, escape the noose.

This will, without question, be one of the most shocking, satisfying, and unhinged books of 2025, making this reader anxious to backtrack and experience Virginia Feito’s debut, Mrs. March, as well as whatever she pens next.

Thank you to Liveright Publishing Corporation/W. W. Norton & Company for sharing an ARC of this novel (scheduled for release in February), won via Goodreads giveaway. It’s a bingeable, grim, wild, sharp, and unforgettable historical trip and a must-read for Victorian/gothic horror enthusiasts.

🖤Amanda

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