Victorian Psycho

Set in Victorian England, the novel is narrated by Winifred Notty, a governess who arrives at Ensor House, a sprawling manor on the moors of Grim Wolds, to care for the children of the wealthy Pounds family. A prologue surveys the omnipresence of death in Victorian life, from contaminated drinking water to wigs made from corpses' hair, establishing the era's casual intimacy with mortality.

Winifred rides across the bleak moorland in an open carriage, her narration addressed conspiratorially to the reader, laced with dark humor. She notes, with calm certainty, that in three months everyone in the house will be dead. Inside, the housekeeper Mrs Able shows her to a small, plain room. At dinner, Winifred meets her employers at the far end of an absurdly long table. Mr Pounds is devoted to phrenology, the pseudoscience of reading character through skull measurements. Mrs Pounds is anxious and visibly unhappy. When Winifred meets her charges the next morning, the Poundses' 13-year-old daughter Drusilla mentions that the previous governess left of her own accord, unable to bear the children.

Winifred's backstory unfolds in fragments. She is the illegitimate daughter of a woman who worked as a servant in a wealthy London household on Harley Street. Her mother tried to kill her twice in infancy, declaring that Winifred possesses "an evil soul, wrapped in darkness" before losing her nerve. As a toddler, Winifred was placed with a foster mother who doped infants with laudanum, a tincture of opium, and quietly strangled them one by one. At about six, her mother posed as a widow and married a curate known as the Reverend, whose household was defined by religious repression. Winifred's mother died when Winifred was about 16. From hidden letters, Winifred possesses correspondence from her biological father ordering her mother to kill their child. The letters bear a gold-leaf boar crest that Winifred has spent her adult life tracing to the Pounds family.

Her two charges are Andrew, an eight-year-old boy who is the sole male heir, brash and spoiled, and Drusilla, pale and quietly sharp. On their first walk, Winifred teaches the children about brood parasitism, explaining that cuckoo chicks kill their nest-mates at birth. When they encounter a dying deer, she beats its skull in with a rock, spattering blood on the children's clothing. "All living creatures are" in pain, she tells them.

Early signs of Winifred's violent compulsions surface. She bites into a raw calf's head in the kitchen. She explores Ensor House at night, discovering a secret garret behind a medieval tapestry, a windowless room she surmises was once used to confine women deemed hysterical. She creeps into bedrooms to watch the family sleep. In flashbacks, she recalls being attacked at 16 by a rabid man at the parsonage and bludgeoning him with a lead clock weight, feeling no fear. At the Clergy Daughters' School, she smuggled a decomposing crow's maggots into the communal food on Easter Sunday, making every girl violently ill. She was the only healthy child, and the school expelled her.

Winifred becomes fixated on Mr Pounds, seeing in him "a glint of myself," and cultivates his attention through weekly walks. During a phrenology session, he measures her skull and declares, astonished, that they possess "the very same skull." That night she writes "Winifred Pounds" on paper and eats it. Mrs Pounds grows increasingly jealous and paranoid, punishing Winifred by forcing her to sleep in the dog kennel.

The household fractures when Mr Pounds commissions a portrait of his wife from Mr Gotthard Johnson, a lecherous painter. Winifred discovers Johnson and Drusilla in a furtive embrace. When Mrs Pounds finds the painter's love letters in Drusilla's desk, she burns them and blames Winifred for failing to intervene. Drusilla is cast aside while Mr Pounds lavishes attention on Andrew.

Winifred's violence escalates. She lures Andrew into the stall of a neglected horse, then bites its hide, causing the horse to kick the boy in the face. His front teeth turn permanently black. Ancestral portraits in the gallery are found vandalized, their painted eyes removed. Mrs Pounds blames a housemaid, who is convicted and transported to the penal colony of Van Diemen's Land, present-day Tasmania. Winifred committed the vandalism, stealing the eyes as proof of her resemblance to the Pounds lineage.

Mrs Pounds dismisses Winifred effective after Christmas. When Mrs Pounds' friend Mrs Fancey visits with her infant son, Winifred takes the baby to the nursery. After guzzling a vial of Godfrey's Cordial, a laudanum-laced tincture, she hallucinates the baby taunting her about her illegitimacy. She slits the infant's throat with her father's razor, steals a replacement baby from a nearby farm, and ships the corpse to a nunnery in a doll box. Mrs Fancey does not notice the substitution.

Part II opens 20 days before Christmas. Winifred prowls the house nightly, obsessing over whether Drusilla witnessed the murder. Her next victim is Sue Lamb, the pretty young housemaid. When Winifred takes Lamb's earlobe into her mouth, the maid recoils and threatens to expose her. Winifred stabs Lamb in the neck with a shard of broken glass and drags the body to the secret garret.

Christmas guests arrive for a fortnight, including Mr Art Fishal, who unwraps an Egyptian mummy as his holiday surprise. Mr Pounds shows Winifred pornographic books late at night, calling her "Phrenology twin!" Winifred's grip on reality loosens. She sleepwalks, mistakes the hall boy Fergus for a portrait, and stabs him in the eye with a stolen letter opener. Bodies accumulate in the garret. Mrs Pounds gives Winifred an apple-green dress dyed with arsenic for Christmas Eve.

During the Christmas Eve feast, hallucinations cascade through Winifred's mind during a game of blind man's buff. Earlier, Drusilla had confided "I know your secret," but meant only that Winifred loves Mr Pounds. On Christmas morning, Winifred follows Mr Pounds to the library and reveals: "I am yours, Mr Pounds. I am your daughter." She presents the stolen portrait eyes as proof. He is horrified and dismisses her immediately.

What follows is a sustained massacre. Winifred moves through the house with a cleaver, a crossbow from the armoury, and whatever comes to hand, killing guests and servants alike. In the nursery, Mr Pounds cowers behind his wife and son, then pushes them toward Winifred and flees. Andrew cries, "Mother, she's the cuckoo!" echoing her earlier lesson on brood parasites, before she shoots him in the forehead. She kills Mrs Pounds, who dies calling her "the worst governess we've ever had." Downstairs, Mr Pounds' ankle is caught in a leghold trap Winifred had stolen from the gamekeeper. He offers her the estate. "All I ever wanted was a family," she replies. As he lunges at her, Drusilla appears with a rapier and thrusts it through his heart. The two hunt down the remaining survivors together.

Over 12 days, Winifred and Drusilla inhabit the corpse-filled house, seating the dead at the dinner table and freeing the horses from the stables. A scullery maid hiding among the bodies escapes and boards a train. On the twelfth day, police arrive, finding bodies hanging from trees along the drive. They discover Drusilla with her wrists tied to an oven handle, sobbing, "She killed them all." Winifred, wearing a dead guest's wig, is led away.

Before a crowd of 30,000, Winifred is led laughing to the gallows. The chaplain asks if she has anything to say. "It was grand," she replies. "It was all grand." She refuses the executioner's white nightcap: "No, I want to see." She spots Drusilla in the crowd, whose eyes brim with the tears Winifred could never produce. The drop falls. The narration predicts her afterlife in print: Penny dreadfuls, cheaply printed sensational stories, will circulate gruesome accounts of her murders, and "little girls everywhere will know they can aspire to kill, too."