Victorian Psycho Review: A 3.5⭐ Bloodbath That Left Me Feeling Complicated 🩸
You’ve been warned: The triggers are plentiful
Before we dive into the blood-soaked halls of Ensor House, let’s get this out of the way. Victorian Psycho is not for the faint of heart. Content warnings include: graphic violence, child death, infanticide, animal cruelty, sexual harassment, racism, self-harm, suicide, mental illness, abuse (physical, emotional, child), substance use, and enough cursing to make a sailor blush. If any of these are dealbreakers, this is your exit. 🚪
What is Victorian Psycho about?
Virginia Feito’s 2025 novel is a satirical historical fiction and femgore horror mashup that became a national bestseller and snagged “Best Book of the Year” nods from The New Yorker, NPR, and Time . It’s a pastiche of 19th-century literature that follows Winifred Notty, a governess whose prim exterior hides a deeply psychopathic interior. She arrives at the grim Ensor House to tutor the children of the wealthy Pounds family, secretly believing the master of the house is the aristocratic father who abandoned her .
The novel explores The Normalization of Systemic Violence, The Commodification of Human Bodies, and The Absurdity of Class Superiority through Winifred’s bloody rampage. A film adaptation starring Maika Monroe is already in the works .
SPOILER WARNING ⚠️
From here on out, I’m spilling EVERYTHING. The full plot. The ending. The carnage. If you want to go in blind, scroll to the recommendations at the bottom.
Plot summary: A governess, a grudge, and a lot of corpses
Winifred Notty arrives at Ensor House to tutor Andrew and Drusilla Pounds. She believes Mr. Pounds is her long-lost father, and she’s there for revenge . The household is immediately hostile: Mrs. Pounds forces Winifred to sleep in the dog kennel as punishment for a minor infraction, while Mr. Pounds, a devotee of phrenology, becomes fascinated by Winifred and declares their skulls identical .
Winifred’s violent urges surface quickly. On a walk with the children, she finds an injured deer and bludgeons it to death with a rock, framing it as mercy . During a tea party, she’s left alone with an infant named William Fancey. After hallucinating an argument with the baby about her illegitimacy, she slits his throat with a straight razor that belonged to her father. To cover it up, she steals a peasant baby, dresses it in the dead infant’s clothes, and returns it to the oblivious mother. She then mails the original baby’s corpse to a nunnery in a doll box .
Her behavior escalates: she vandalizes family portraits to compare eye colors, gets a housemaid deported for the crime, and develops a predatory obsession with Sue Lamb, a maid. When Sue rejects her advances and threatens to expose her, Winifred murders her and hides the body in a secret garret .
The household descends into chaos that the self-absorbed Pounds family fails to notice. Winifred orchestrates an “accident” in the stables that knocks out Andrew’s front teeth, leading to her dismissal. But she’s allowed to stay through Christmas to chaperone Drusilla. She begins terrorizing the estate at night, killing a hall boy she mistakes for a portrait, convincing everyone the house is haunted .
On Christmas Day, Winifred confronts Mr. Pounds in his library, revealing her belief that she’s his daughter and presenting the stolen painted eyes of his ancestors as proof. He rejects her and orders her to leave. This triggers a massacre. Armed with a meat cleaver and later a crossbow, she chops off a guest’s hand at the piano, kills another with a mourning brooch, and shoots Andrew and Mrs. Pounds with arrows. When Mr. Pounds lunges at her, Drusilla appears and impales him with a rapier, revealing herself as Winifred’s silent accomplice .
Winifred and Drusilla live among the decaying corpses, hosting macabre dinner parties and letting horses roam the blood-soaked halls. Their reign ends when an escaped scullery maid alerts the police. Drusilla stages a scene of survival, tying herself up and betraying Winifred as the sole murderer. Winifred is arrested, becomes a public sensation at trial, and is executed by hanging while laughing. Her legacy is cemented in penny dreadfuls .
My honest thoughts: Great kills, rough reading experience
Look, I enjoyed the deaths. There, I said it. Winifred is a deliciously unhinged narrator, and Feito’s prose has a scalpel-sharp quality that makes the gore almost poetic . The satire of Victorian hypocrisy lands, and Drusilla’s betrayal at the end? Chef’s kiss. 👩🍳💋
But here’s the thing: this book is short (around 200 pages) yet it felt long. It’s not a fly-through read. The dense, period-accurate prose and Winifred’s rambling internal monologue create a slow, suffocating pace that mirrors the oppressive atmosphere of Ensor House. That’s intentional, I think. It’s meant to feel claustrophobic. But it also made the reading experience a bit of a slog for me.
I’d put it down, pick it back up, put it down again. The storyline? Compelling. The reading experience? Mixed. Hence the 3.5 stars. ⭐⭐⭐✨
Book recommendations if you liked Victorian Psycho
Maeve Fly by CJ Leede — A fellow unhinged female protagonist with a taste for violence and dark humor
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis — The obvious comp. Patrick Bateman walked so Winifred could run
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James — Gothic governess vibes with a psychological twist
Motherthing by Ainslie Hogarth — Darkly funny horror about domestic rage and unreliable narrators
Mrs. March by Virginia Feito — Feito’s debut, if you want more of her sharp, unsettling style
Final verdict
Victorian Psycho is a bold, bloody, and bitterly funny novel that delivers on its premise. Winifred Notty is an iconic antiheroine you’ll love to hate—or just love, depending on your tolerance for baby-murdering governesses. 😅
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐✨
Would I read it again? Probably not. Am I glad I read it once? Absolutely.
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