VICTORIAN PSYCHO

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, sophisticated Mrs. 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.