Rating:

“I wonder if this blackness isn’t in fact the real world, and the true blindfold is that other world of color we are accustomed to.”

Author: Virginia Feito

Winifred Notty is the new governess for Ensor House, where she will work with her charges Drusilla and Andrew. On the outside, she seems like the model governess, if a bit too young and pretty for Mrs. Pounds’ taste. On the inside, she is a sociopath with a taste for violence. Here and there, when the children are alone, she lets little clues sneak through, such as jokes about eating them. As her time at Ensor House draws to a close, her gruesome games increase, going from subtle expressions of misanthropy (putting disgusting tidbits into the family food) to outright murder.

I came to Victorian Psycho from a GoodReads list that had led me to some truly interesting books. In an unquenchable mood for horror, I continued and soon lost my appetite. Victorian Psycho is the kind of horror novel that I hate. The horror novels I love set good characters against evil monsters or circumstances, making the best and worst in humanity shine and giving us some insight into the human condition alongside some thrills. Victorian Psycho, on the other hand, is pure torture porn. There are no likeable characters, there are no feelings besides a bestial desire to do the worst possible, and there are no limits. Indeed, we get a very long sequence with Winifred (who is both main character and our sardonic, unfeeling narrator) slicing a baby’s throat and tricking the mother with a new baby in her dead baby’s steed. This isn’t a horror story so much as a sequence of the worst a mind can conjure, with no redemption and no reason in sight.

Image by Brigitte182 from Pixabay

Winifried languidly tells the tale. Oscillating between her disgusting stories of the most unappetizing dinners and her general aural fixation, she casually describes her past murders and her plans for more. The Pounds are selfish and notice nothing. The children are scared, but marginalized, except for the young Druisilla, who finds a sympathetic soul in the homicidal governess. The murders escalate and no one seems to notice Winifried dragging dead bodies around the house, literally under their very noses.

The ending is a bit shocking, but we expected that. The author was clearly pushing a boundary, a personal competition to think up and write down the worst possible things one human could do to another, without coloring the resulting sequences with any remorse or even any malice. Winifried is almost bored as she murders and tortures and maims, and the narrative shruggingly follows along. Of course, this novel shows the evil humans are capable of more than most horror novels, but in a way that will give us outlandish, overblown nightmares instead of touch portions of our souls and imaginations. There is artistry here, but it is in the service of shocking and repulsing us, filling our minds with unimaginable betrayals and acts. I finished the book, shuddered, and wished I could rinse my mind out with bleach.

Horror novels, of course, are subject to this extremism. There are really two classes: imaginative stories that use elements of horror but still stay human (think Dracula) and then what I call torture porn, where sociopathy is given space to breathe on the page. These later novels, to my thinking, do no one any good, and instead spread rot to the soul.

In the end, Victorian Psycho is an ode to depravity. Not recommended.

– Frances Carden

Follow my reviews on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/xombie_mistress

Follow my reviews on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/FrancesReviews

Frances Carden
Latest posts by Frances Carden (see all)