Victorian Psycho

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.