Victorian Psycho

Feito (Mrs. March) unspools a bold and mordant gothic novel about a murderous governess. Winifred Knotty was born in Victorian England with an “evil soul,” according to her mother. Winifred’s stepfather, a reverend, regularly performed exorcisms on her as a girl, for macabre behavior such as collecting the corpses of murdered babies in their small village and arranging them on her shelves (“Good, now, I am cured,” she said disingenuously after one such exorcism). Eventually, she finds employment as a governess for the Pounds family at their estate on the moors, where she tells the two children that her previous charges “dropped dead.” According the book’s front matter, the Poundses don’t have long to live (“In three months everyone in this house will be dead,” reads a caption under a drawing of an estate; “Death everywhere. Death in the river, in the corpses floating upstream and down,” begins the preface). The novel’s perverse thrill is in slowly uncovering how and why the Poundses meet their fate. Along the way, Feito provides readers with searing glimpses of Winifred’s derangement (she bites into a raw chicken in front of the cook and pretends to be a ghost haunting the house). Fans of psychological horror will be enthralled. (Feb.)