by Virginia Feito
I'd heard great things about this book, so when I was trying to kill time during a car repair and this was featured at the Barnes & Noble in the shopping center I was killing time at, I picked it up and proceeded to almost finish it by the time they were done with my car. Then I got home and finished it.
At only 193 pages, Victorian Psycho is a quick read. And I wanted to love it, I really did. It has received slavish praise, in fact the book opens with four pages of raves. But although I liked it a lot, I didn't love it the way I 'd hoped to. It just isn't going to haunt me the way I expected it to based on what I'd heard about it.
We open to Winifred Notty arriving at Ensor House in early autumn, where she is to be governess to the two unimpressive Pounds children. She first meets their equally unimpressive parents, but not before informing us, in quite the setup, just as she's about to enter the house for the first time, "...in three months everyone in this house will be dead." Not quite, but by the time the promised graphic mayhem descends on the Pounds, their Christmas guests, and their staff, we have learned not only how profoundly disturbed Miss Notty is, but that she targeted this house, this family, and Mr. Pounds in particular for a reason.
I wouldn't say that Feito created a Dexter Morgan-level of anti-hero/heroine, as I wasn't rooting for Miss Notty so much as I was just curious as to what her plans - which promised to be horrific - were. So for me this was a good, but not a great, read. It's also heading to the big screen and given the slimness of this volume, I was instantly curious as to how it will be expanded. I think part of the answer comes in the film's poster, in which Thomasin McKenzie (who has made some amazing career choices with Jojo Rabbit and Fackham Hall) as the maid Miss Lamb, an important but ultimately minor character in the novel, is second billed. And it does need to be expanded, and I'm guessing this being Hollywood it will have a heavy-handed feminist message. Because we're supposed to empathize with Miss Notty, in spite of the fact that she makes it clear she is evil and always has been. How better to try to make her sympathetic by blaming her father for making her a bastard child, then abandoning her and her mother, rather than her own resident evil.
Speaking of the film adaptation, I don't know anything about the actress cast as Winifred Notty (that name!), but according to her imdb page Maika Monroe doesn't fit the description of Miss Notty being fat and ugly. They could have cast a fat, unattractive actress, but...I guess we'll see how it all turns out later this year when the film is released. But I'm not expecting much.
So the good news: I didn't spend too much time on this book. The bad news: I wanted to love it so much more, but I'm glad I didn't pay for the hardcover version.
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