My letter “V” pick for this year’s A to Z reading challenge was VICTORIAN PSYCHO by Virginia Feito.

Where do I begin with this one? The author is either a brilliant horror writer, or there is something seriously twisted within her. I suspect it’s a good amount of both.

Our story centers around one Winifred Notty, who has been hired as a governess by the unsuspecting family of Mr. John Pound. Throughout Winifred’s narrative, we get glimpses of a very tortured childhood that led to extremely troubling life choices and an aura of casual evil that chills you to the bone.

She throws out little tidbits here and there, scattering a disturbing trail of WTF breadcrumbs, like when she mentions she instructs the children on the subjects of history, French, and the color of a corpse’s flesh. There are also incidents like the time she impulsively slashes the throat of a baby belonging to a visiting neighbor, then switches the child with a poor baby stolen from the nearby village (and the vapid, uninvolved Victorian mother never notices). I’ll warn you now that she describes the death – and all the deaths – with horrific attention to detail and ghastly descriptions of the victims flailing, or screams, or begging, and the expressions on their faces. It’s hard to read, especially when it’s children (yes, that’s a plural).

The story culminates in as grisly an ending as you can imagine – and then some. Now please tell me why I am drawn to Winifred so much? She’s not presented as a sympathetic character at all, I assure you, but there’s something about the effortless way she weaves her madness and casually strokes her evil that you simply cannot look away. The prose in this novel is masterful, the characters are all vividly painted, and the story will haunt me for years to come. Four and a half stars.