Three Days in June, Victorian Psycho

must reads?

What a strange person Virginia Feito must be. She has followed up Mrs March - her queasy, claustrophobic tale of a woman going mad - with Victorian Psycho, a queasy, claustrophobic tale of a woman going really mad.

The plot: Winifred Notty, the titular psycho, arrives at a grand house in Yorkshire to take up her post as a governess to two children. She’s not just any psycho, but a psycho on a mission; dark shit ensues.

I have seen this book described as satire, but I wonder if parody or spoof is more appropriate. There is a character called William Ebenezer Poncey Fancey. One chapter begins, “I awake to birdsong so shrill I believe it is Mother screaming again.”

Feito has certainly ripped off all the spooky novels I’ve ever read - there are bits of Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Secret Garden, Rebecca, Turn of the Screw - and also some modern horrors: How May I Help You, Notes on a Scandal, American Psycho and, *key change*, Gosford Park. All stitched together like a ghastly Frankenstein’s monster. There are relentless, Tarantino levels of lurid gore, with severed arteries, people stabbed in the eye, hands cut off, vocal cords torn out and so on. When the narrative is feeling a bit too normal, Feito will toss in a whinnying insanity like this:

I nod at the liveried footmen standing rigidly on either side of the drawing room door. Their faces are so solemn, so unbearably austere, I unpin my pearl brooch and swallow it.

Sorry, she does what? I sometimes struggle to swallow my daily 5-HTP anti-anxiety pill, which is designed for the purpose. The brooch is never mentioned again.

I don’t really know what the point of this book is, other than to stun everyone into silence with what a gruesomely horrid imagination Feito has. At some points I had to sort of slither my eyes over passages that I knew I didn’t want to read. I did wonder if it is intended as a feminist act, a declaration that women have as foul a mind as any man.

Winifred says,

I fail to understand why men think talk of violence will distress women. Women, who bleed all over themselves every month, who rub blood clots between their fingers and burst them like insects

Speak for yourself, lady. Just personally, I’m not unsettled because this book has been written by a woman so much as I’m unsettled because this book has been written by a human being.

Perhaps Victorian Psycho is nothing more than Feito just got the voice of Winifred Notty into her head, liked it and started typing. I suppose she is very into describing the evils of 1) Empire and 2) Men but I think we’ve grasped now, in 2025, that Empire and Men are evil. If that’s the point, it’s not a hot take.

Victorian Psycho isn’t a bad book and I’m sure it will do very well. Feito is a good writer with a great sense of humour and very stylish, a bit like a Black Mirror Patrick deWitt. It’s just what she chooses to write about that’s a bit strange. Or maybe not that strange, as this book will definitely be right up some people’s streets. If you find putrefying corpses, murdered babies, ornamental letter-openers, rotting crows and gruesome, bloody violence amusing then run, don’t walk, to Waterstone’s. Otherwise, give it a miss.

Ann Tyler’s new novel, Three Days in June, isn’t her best but we are lucky to have it anyway. Anne Tyler is absolutely peerless when it comes to describing ordinary people with profundity, wit and humanity.

My favourite Tyler novel is A Spool of Blue Thread, which made me wonder if I ought to give up writing, as I would never be anything like as good as this. There is a line in The Accidental Tourist that made me laugh so much at the time that I wept and drooled. It has continued to make me laugh at odd moments ever since.

But it is also the case that I have abandoned other Tylers novels around chapter three, because for whatever reason they didn’t stick. This surprised me: the other books were so dazzling I thought she wasn’t capable of writing a dud - even though the duds were several thousand times better than the next best book by someone else. That’s the problem with being too good; you sell 50k copies of a book and it’s considered a failure because the last one sold millions and won a Pulitzer.

But Tyler says herself that some of her books are good and some are less good and this easy-come, easy-go attitude must be what keeps her so productive. She’s 83 for Chrissake! If I am rich at 83 I am going to live on a sun lounger somewhere hot and be drunk all the time.

Three Days in June is about a woman in her sixties called Gail and the three days around the wedding of her daughter, Debbie. In typical Tyler fashion, not very much happens. Gail hangs out with her ex husband, Max, we find out why they split up, and Debbie gets married. A rescue cat is a big character.

All professional writers - and some amateur ones - will understand what I mean by throat-clearing and treading water. Throat-clearing happens when you’re starting a piece of work but you’re not quite sure what it’s about yet, so you go blah blah blah de blah and just keep writing until something good comes out. Treading water happens usually in fiction, and it’s when you’re not quite sure what’s going to happen next - so you go blah blah blah de blah and just keep writing until something good comes out.

All writers do this. The main task of the writer is to just get a lot of words down on the page. They can be rearranged later. The idea is you go back and delete all the throat-clearing and the water-treading.

There is quite a lot of what looks to me like water-treading in this book - sentences that don’t add anything to the plot, the characters or the atmosphere. It’s a slim novel so every line needs to matter, but they don’t always. An early conversation between Gail and Max is so inconsequential that I started giggling at its sheer banality until I realised that it wasn’t meant to be funny (you can never quite tell with Tyler). She uses clichés, such as Things were hanging in the balance. There are random observations that feel profoundly pointless in such a short novel, such as this about a waitress,

No sign of pen and paper, but I guess at her age she felt she could trust her memory.

There are also seemingly significant happenings that lead nowhere - someone is absent from the wedding rehearsal with a migraine; Gail decides on a whim not to wear tights with her wedding outfit. But the migraine is inconsequential, as is the tights decision. It’s like Tyler forgot to take out some of her blah blah blah de blahs.

Then there is the character of our heroine, Gail. We are told that she lacks people skills, but throughout the novel she displays plenty of people skills. She is nice to her ex-husband, extremely caring and thoughtful towards her daughter, Debbie. She makes no faux pas at the wedding that I noticed. And she is also said to be a great maths teacher. A great maths teacher! To be a great teacher of anything you have to have people skills up the wazoo. It doesn’t quite add up.

Having said that, this is a perfectly charming book and if you are a Tyler fan, you will like it. It is actually a great privilege to see inside one of Tyler’s less-good novels. Otherwise she would be too dazzling, too perfect. The rest of us really would have to give up.

As usual, I am always delighted to receive your book recommendations, new or old. Fiction or non-fiction. Do leave a comment in the handy box below.