All the deaths in Victorian Psycho: the full list — and the one kill that isn't Winifred's

Virginia Feito's Victorian Psycho, published by Liveright on February 4, 2025, sends governess Winifred Notty to Ensor House, the Pounds family's estate on the Yorkshire moors, and lets her narrate a killing spree in 208 pages. Feito told NPR she wanted to see a woman murder "for no reason just other than pleasure." Smart Bitches, Trashy Books reviewer Carrie S. called the final body count "indisputably considerable."

The list below follows the novel. Zachary Wigon's film adaptation, with Maika Monroe as Winifred, opens in the US on November 13 through Bleecker Street, and reactions out of its Cannes premiere suggest the ending may not match the book scene for scene, per Books of Brilliance.

Before Christmas

Winifred starts small and escalates fast, according to plot summaries from SoBrief and SuperSummary:

• A deer: Her first kill on the page, bludgeoned with a rock in front of the Pounds children.
• Baby William Fancey: Mrs. Fancey's infant, killed in the nursery during afternoon tea with her father's straight razor. His body goes to a nunnery in a doll box, and a peasant baby is swapped in to cover it up.
• Sue Lamb: The housemaid threatens to tell Mr. Pounds what she knows, and Winifred drives a shard of milk glass into her neck. The body goes to the secret garret behind the hunting tapestry in the gallery.
• Fergus: The hall boy is stabbed in the eye with a letter opener during one of Winifred's night walks, after she mistakes him for a portrait in the dark gallery.

Two more servants leave the house without dying. A young housemaid is wrongly accused of a crime and deported to a penal colony, and a scullery maid escapes, which matters later. Winifred's past is littered too: her mother died by fire, and she hints at infants in her hometown who died under suspicious circumstances.

The Christmas massacre

Everything breaks when Mr. Pounds rejects Winifred and orders her out of the house. She goes through the household and its guests with whatever the medieval house can provide, including a meat cleaver and a crossbow from the armory:

• Mr. Fancey: Strangled with his own bootlace.
• The Dowager: Her skull beaten in with her own cane.
• Mr. Fishal: Impaled on a set of mounted stag antlers.
• Marigold: Stabbed.
• Miss Manners: Her hand is chopped off with a cleaver. The summaries don't say whether she survives it.
• The servants: Cut down with every weapon the house offers.
• Andrew and Mrs. Pounds: The son and mother of the house are shot with the armory crossbow.

The guest-by-guest details come from SoBrief's summary. For the last stretch, SoBrief describes Winifred and Drusilla finishing the household together, while SuperSummary credits the crossbow killings of Andrew and Mrs. Pounds to Winifred.

"This is just Winifred doing stand-up comedy."

— Virginia Feito, on her narrator, to NPR

The one kill that isn't Winifred's

Mr. Pounds dies last, and not by Winifred's hand. Winifred believes he's her aristocratic father, and he has spent the book admiring her through phrenology, insisting their skulls match. At Christmas, a crossbow bolt catches him in the shoulder, a leghold trap pins him in the dining room, and he raises a carving knife.

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His daughter Drusilla stops him. She runs him through the chest with a rapier, straight through the heart.

Winifred wanted Mr. Pounds to claim her as his daughter. He died at the hands of the daughter he already had.

That rapier is the hinge of the ending. After the massacre, Winifred and Drusilla are the only two people left alive in Ensor House, and only one of them hangs for it.

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