B+
Genre: Gothic, Horror, Historical: European
TW: Where should I even start? This book contains (and the review mentions) child abuse, spousal abuse, infanticide, religious and secular hypocrisy, animal death and abuse, gore, murder, suicide, self harm, self-immolation (twice!) and a teensy tiny whiff of incest. And quite possibly some other things that I forgot.
Ed.note: before you continue reading this review, please be aware that the TW/CW above includes discussion in this review. Reader discretion advised.
Victorian Psycho is what would happen if Patrick Bateman and Jane Eyre had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad baby. Protagonist and narrator Winifred Dotty has no ability to experience fear or empathy. She is completely indifferent to physical pain, be it her own or that of others. She has an endless fascination with corpses. She has a compulsion to both plan crimes and to commit them on impulse. Naturally, she is employed as a governess.
Winifred’s recollections of her life take us through a kind of Haunted House of Victorian Horrors, including spousal abuse, child abuse, religious hypocrisy, baby farming, and a boarding school in which disease runs rampant through the starved and frozen student population. She tells these stories of her past while she fulfills her duties as a governess by day and roams the house in the night. Yellow wallpaper makes an appearance, as does the following:
Crawling through the child-size doorway, I ascend a set of cramped stairs to a secret garret. The room is windowless and bare but for a rusted tin tub. This must be where the Poundses have stowed their generations of female hysterics through the ages.
I can’t tell you how much I love the idea that a secret attic for madwomen is a standard household feature for the rich.
Winifred is an unreliable narrator who experiences vivid hallucinations. Are bodies really “piling up in the attic” as she says? I know that the attic must be cold in winter but sooner or later you’d think they’d start to smell. So we are never quite sure of her actual body count, only that by the end of the book it is indisputably considerable.
This is a short, gruesome, fast-paced thriller with nary a drop of romance in it. I can’t even honestly say that it’s full of female rage, because for the most part Winifred views the world around her with a dispassionate eye, regarding the havoc she wreaks with a kind of distant, academic interest. You’d think a character with literally not one single redeeming quality (other than a positively wicked intelligence and the deadest deadpan snark in history) would be dull, but I was fascinated by her, constantly turning the pages to see what would happen next.
One cannot fully rely on Winifred to provide a cathartic feeling of justice, since Winifred murders and otherwise causes suffering to the innocent and guilty alike – infants, small children, servants – the rich and the poor, she kills them all. And yet I found myself reading with a kind of appalled admiration – she is so very, very beyond any kind of rules that she has a certain outlaw appeal, and because we are in her head, we can’t not root for her at least a little bit.
There is also considerable humor if you like humor that has passed beyond gallows humor and pitched straight into the grave. Here’s a passage that manages to contain a sharp commentary on hypocrisy, an interesting and disturbing peek into how this particular psychopath thinks, and, if your sense of humor is grim enough, a bit of deranged hilarity:
Over dinner, Mr. Pounds, the magenta in his face flourishing after a few glasses of wine, discusses the controversial Factory Act, implemented to improve conditions for children toiling in the factories. Mr. Pounds praises the security of working children. ‘Children’ – he swallows a belch – ‘must be protected.’ (At least two hundred under ten died in his own mills before the act was introduced.)
I wonder what all the fuss with children is about. They’re only people, albeit smaller. Why care about people when they’re small if no one cares about them when they’re grown?
I’m also fond of this conversation between two houseguests regarding phrenology:
“Come now, John, how can you justify their claims that his organs of benevolence and conscientiousness also happened to be ‘Extremely large?'”
“Well, to be fair, he didn’t commit any murders until his thirty-sixth year -”
“Didn’t he eat his own children with a spoon?’”asks Marigold’s husband.
This book is clever, ruthless, funny, and violent. Half of the readers in the world will love this book. The other half will be utterly appalled. A few of us will meet in the middle, like a penny dreadful Venn diagram.
At what point in my life did I find it possible to read about the murder – described graphically on page – of a baby? And yet I must say that Winifred’s reaction to her impulsive action is hilarious. Covered with blood, with a corpse on her hands, in a house full of people in broad daylight, she ruminates, “I didn’t think this through.” The hell you say!
Grading this book is virtually impossible, but the tight story, clever mix of horror, humor, and social commentary, and Victorian tropes is fantastic. I did feel that there was an over abundance of fat shaming and that brought the grade down. Apparently I can tolerate the murder of dozens of people of every age, gender, and social class but I draw the line at fat shaming. Winifred would find this to be very amusing.
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About Winifred’s perverse appeal:
So my mother is somewhere on the psychopathy spectrum; she is law-abiding (and non-murdery!), but this seems to be mostly because she doesn’t like dealing with potentially annoying negative consequences more than anything else. You would never notice if you didn’t live with her, but she is not human. Yet, in her own bizarre way, she is magnificent, and I understand why my father adores and is devoted to her even though I personally cannot have anything to do with her. There is a compelling, oddly glorious purity to a person so completely amoral, and it makes the rest of us, with our messy conflicting motives and consciences, seem sort of muddled by comparison.
Almost all of the thrillers I’ve read involving psychopaths utterly failed to capture that aspect of them (it seems to translate better to visual media?), so I’m really intrigued that this one actually does. Thank you for reviewing this! I hadn’t even heard about it.
Well, this sounds interesting! Will put it on my TBR!
This type of over the top dark humor reminds me of Candide by Voltaire!
It’s so satirically bleak that it loops back around to being ridiculous and funny.
(Or there is something wrong with me…)
“You’d think a character with literally not one single redeeming quality (other than a positively wicked intelligence and the deadest deadpan snark in history) would be dull…”
On the contrary, that kind of person sounds super interesting to read about! 🙂 Winifred seems like just my cup of sencha, so I’m adding this novel to my to-read-list. Horrible people are up there with Tyrannosaurs and post-apocalyptic landscapes on my list of things I enjoy (on the written page, safely away from me).
I ended up reading this in one day. Pun intended, it was cuttingly satirical–and wickedly funny. Things like the mothers of the local genteel households praising “motherly tenderness and morality” while also being “unfamiliar with raising children” (as they have nurses and governesses to do that) to the point one of them doesn’t realize her baby has been replaced with another one; the “small cruelties” disguised as compliments passed down from the husband to the wife and then the mother to the children who in turn try to be cruel to their governess (who is “not very impressed”); the entire mummy unwrapping scene; and the many many times Winifred gets caught in clear red-flag-raising behavior, only to be ignored because it’s too strange to talk about; all pile up in a hilarious, horrific trainwreck. “Feminine rage” isn’t quite the right word, but it definitely falls somewhere in the same general vicinity.