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Summary
Summary
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SLATE
For fans of Anne Rice, The Historian, and The Night Circus, an astonishing debut, a novel of epic scope and suspense that conjures up all the magic and menace of Victorian London
1892: James Norbury, a shy would-be poet newly down from Oxford, finds lodging with a charming young aristocrat. Through this new friendship, he is introduced to the drawing-rooms of high society and finds love in an unexpected quarter. Then, suddenly, he vanishes without a trace. Alarmed, his sister, Charlotte, sets out from their crumbling country estate determined to find him. In the sinister, labyrinthine London that greets her, she uncovers a hidden, supernatural city populated by unforgettable characters: a female rope walker turned vigilante, a street urchin with a deadly secret, and the chilling "Doctor Knife." But the answer to her brother's disappearance ultimately lies within the doors of the exclusive, secretive Aegolius Club, whose predatory members include the most ambitious, and most bloodthirsty, men in England.
In her first novel, Lauren Owen has created a fantastical world that is both beguiling and terrifying. The Quick will establish her as one of fiction's most dazzling talents.
Praise for The Quick
"A suspenseful, gloriously atmospheric first novel, and a feast of gothic storytelling that is impossible to resist." --Kate Atkinson
"A cracking good read . . . Owen takes the gothic conventions of the vampire novel in a refreshing new direction." --Deborah Harkness, author of A Discovery of Witches and The Book of Life
"A good old-fashioned vampire novel . . . What fun." -- The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)
" The Quick is that rare book that reviewers and readers live for: both plot- and character-driven, a stay-up-all-night reading romp. . . . This is elegant, witty, force-of-nature writing." --The Dallas Morning News
"The book's energy, its wide reach and rich detail make it a confident example of the 'unputdownable' novel." --The Economist
"A seamless blend of Victorian London and rich imagination." --Tana French, author of In the Woods
"A thrilling tale . . . This book will give you chills even on a hot day." -- Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Stylishly sinister . . . will have you sleeping with the lights on." --O: The Oprah Magazine
"A sly and glittering addition to the literature of the macabre." --Hilary Mantel, author of Wolf Hall
"A big, sly bucketful of the most tremendous fun . . . [Owen] weaves what's here with what's beyond as easily as J. K. Rowling does." -- Slate
"[An author of] prodigious gifts . . . Owen captures Dickens's London with glee and produces a number of characters Dickens would be happy to call his own." --Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Author Notes
Lauren Owen was born in 1985. She studied at Oxford University and the University of East Anglia, where she received the 2009 Curtis Brown Prize for the best fiction dissertation. The Quick is her first novel. She lives in Northern England.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Though currently enjoying a resurgence in popularity, vampires as we know them are a Victorian invention: Dracula came out in 1897. Debut author Owen sets her seductive book in 1892, in a late-Victorian London with a serious vampire problem. And like her Victorian counterparts, Owen depicts a host of characters: there's shy, provincial poet James Norbury and his intrepid sister Charlotte; vampire hunters Adeline Swift and Shadwell; a rich American in danger; and Augustus Mould, who researches vampire myth and fact on behalf of the vampires, and who's as warm and friendly as his name suggests. The vampire world is divided: the elite men of the Aegolius club coexist, not happily, with a ragged band of underclass undead. The book's pleasures include frequent viewpoint shifts that require readers to figure out how each character fits into the story, new riffs on vampire rituals and language, plus several love affairs, most of which are doomed. And there's plenty of action-Mould's research, the clubmen's recruitment efforts, escalating battles between vampires and vampire hunters and among the vampires, and Charlotte's efforts to save James. Though the book has an old-fashioned, leisurely pace, which might cause some reader impatience, Owen's sentence-by-sentence prose is extraordinarily polished-a noteworthy feat for a 500-page debut-and she packs many surprises into her tale, making it a book for readers to lose themselves in. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Owen's strong debut infuses the classic Victorian-set horror novel with many original, bloody twists. It begins at a decaying Yorkshire mansion, the childhood home of James Norbury and his sister, Charlotte, and later moves over to London. Here James, a new Oxford grad, plans to hone his poetry-writing skills. Then, suddenly, what seems to be a gothic saga transforms into an intricate, sinister epic involving many unique personalities, immense personal danger, unexpected love, and an unusual pursuit of scientific advancement all centering on the exclusive Aegolius Club. Revealing any more would be a spoiler. With her startling plot, Owen proves a master at anticipating readers' thoughts about future happenings and then crumbling them into dust. Her world building is exceptional, and readers will simultaneously embrace and shrink from the atmosphere's elegant ghastliness, but the novel's structure is uneven it feels overlong in places and she devotes regrettably little time to her most intriguing characters. It's an impressive feat, nonetheless, one with the potential to attract a cult (and occult) following this summer.--Johnson, Sarah Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
READING THE BLURBS on the dust jacket of Lauren Owen's first novel - from such luminaries as Kate Atkinson, Hilary Mantel and Tana French - readers might think they're about to embark on a highhanded version of the Gothic novel, full of metafictions and literary allusions. These do appear, along with some beautiful language, but by Page 100, when the first neck is about to be bitten, "The Quick" drops its cloak and becomes a good old-fashioned vampire novel. Vampire? you say. The word is only a whisper until Page 157, and never spoken by the main characters. Owen cleverly keeps a hush on things, knowing that any modern reader will come well prepared with a stake and holy water to a book with that label. "The expression 'undead' is often considered distasteful," the morbid experimenter Augustus Mould writes in his journals. "'Revenant' will do at a pinch, though the connotations of burial and return are a little indelicate." "The Quick" is the undead's term for the living. Mould is in the employ of the Aegolius Club, a secret society whose members flit through the shadows in the first section of the novel, then strike lustily in the second. That first section is all innocence: It concerns James and Charlotte, brother and sister growing up in a "Turn of the Screw" mansion called Aiskew Hall. After James finishes school, he moves to London to pursue his career as a poet and finds himself rooming with an acquaintance, Christopher Paige, a Victorian Sebastian Flyte whose partying and carefree nature belie a more delicate sensibility. The two struggle as roommates, then find themselves lovers. Owen writes touchingly about their romance - "It was strange, James would think afterwards, how much of the happy time was spent enjoying past unhappiness" - and for a long time it feels as if this will be the heart of the novel. But their romance is the Janet Leigh of this slasher; soon enough, the Aegolius Club takes them down through an unlikely case of mistaken identity. And then we enter a more Gothic mode, beginning with Mould's journals. He writes from an aerie in the club itself, intent on learning the heights of its members' mysterious powers, and the limits: "They are far stronger and faster than ordinary men. They heal speedily from physical injury. If they choose, they can divine one's very thoughts. Holy water, according to most authorities, is poison to them." And so on. Some of the old myths are true, but many are false, and Mould's discoveries prompt a revolt within the club - one that leads, at last, to James's arrival as a newly made revenant for them to claim. Only James does not want claiming. To cover such well-worn narrative ground, a novelist has to either invent new possibilities or invent new storytelling devices. Owen has chosen the latter, and the novel proceeds by looping back over the previous episodes, each time from a different character's perspective. This has the pleasant effect of plunging us into invention and then, slowly, into recognition. It has the unpleasant effect, however, of misshaping the novel - back stories intrude, pages are spent buying and eating potatoes, and while James's long first section is charming, after the action rains down, one looks back on it as on one's wasted youth. After James we hear from the devious Mould, then from a child vampire, and then, for most of the rest of the novel, from James's sister. A naïve young woman from the provinces, Charlotte comes to London to seek out her missing brother. Here is her first glimpse of the city, an example of Owen's flair for well-imagined (rather than overresearched) period description: "King's Cross was an assault on the eyes and ears, a scurry and bustle which almost bewildered her. Alighting from the train, Charlotte was struck by the noise of the place - dozens of voices, and above those the screech and pant of the engines. She found herself engulfed by a crowd of fellow passengers, hemmed in on all sides and borne helplessly forwards. She could smell dirt, sweating human bodies and damp wool and wet dog fur, a thousand other ripe and rotting things all blended together. The station was cold, and she felt insignificant beneath the high ceiling, as if she had dissolved entirely into the crowd. The taste of smoke lingered at the back of her throat." Charlotte turns out to be the true heroine of the novel, arriving as an adult before the halfway mark, and though we spend hundreds of pages more with her, she is never as fully realized as her brother - possibly because she's too busy running from blood-sucking fiends. Instead, she comes across as a somewhat standard Gothic ingénue, though a willful one. Almost immediately, she stumbles upon her saviors, Shadwell and Adeline, a pair of bookish Van Heisings, and an American named Howland, one of the Quick who had been briefly imprisoned with James at the club. There is also another group of undead roaming the back alleys of London: the Alia. In contrast to the pale-faced elite of the club, these are Dickensian urchins, transformed as children and run by the ancient and streetwise Mrs. Price. There is a tortured undead scholar who has taken literal pains to "conquer my instincts." And a mysterious old woman destined to appear in the sequel. "The Quick" is full of these wonderful inventions, while still providing the torn collars and hungry looks the genre demands. Like a corpse in a bag, Owen's novel is lumpy in places, spattered in blood and eventually opens up to horror. What fun. The undead who flit through the shadows in the first section strike lustily in the second. ANDREW SEAN GREER'S novel "The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells" was recently published in paperback.
Guardian Review
The first hundred or so pages of Lauren Owen's novel seem to be setting out her stall as a historical novelist, with nods to Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens and a rather vague sense of Victoriana, characterised by balls and grime and hats. Then, suddenly, with an agreeable sense of shock, we're plunged into a tale of London vampires, of posh clubbable ones pitted against cor-blimey East End ones while decent, classless types attempt to save us all from perdition. Owen's first attempts at writing were Harry Potter fan-fiction stories when she was a teenager, and even though she is now completing a PhD on gothic writing and fan culture, that first connection seems still to resonate through The Quick. This could be a novel for teenagers - although of course it's difficult to pin down the defining characteristics of such a label - but despite the faintly twee style of the storytelling, the plot moves along at a fair crack and is engagingly multi-layered. Jane Housham - Jane Housham The first hundred or so pages of [Lauren Owen]'s novel seem to be setting out her stall as a historical novelist, with nods to Charlotte Bronte and Charles Dickens and a rather vague sense of Victoriana, characterised by balls and grime and hats. - Jane Housham.
Kirkus Review
An elegantly written gothic epic that begins with children isolated in a lonely manor house; takes a spin through the velvet-draped salons of late-Victorian literary London; then settles in to the bloody business of an outbreak of evil magic.The novel draws from several genres and benefits from innumerable literary influences. Indeed, its many elements are so familiar that one feelsnot unpleasantlyas if one has read and loved it already, years ago, but can't remember exactly how it ends. The year is 1892, and James Norbury, a poet fresh from Oxford, has taken rooms with an intriguing young nobleman. Alas, the joys of youthful gay abandon don't last long. James disappears, and his sister Charlotte takes it upon herself to come to London to find him. The ominous city that awaits her will please readers who love magical creatures of the elegant, bloodthirsty variety, and the vast cast of more or less creepy characters that populates the cobblestoned streets will satisfy admirers of ensemble novels. As in Dracula, an obvious influence, the supernatural mystery must be solved by a motley crew of avengers. And although the book is not as lushly described as The Night Circus, Owen's soaring imagination and her light-handed take on magic save this story from being either obvious or boring. Eventually, Charlotte discovers that her brother's disappearance can be traced to a secret organization of gentlemenand no sparkling Beau Brummell or amiable Bertie Wooster is to be found among the terrifying and powerful inner circle of The Aegolius Club.A book that seems to begin as a children's story ends in blood-soaked mayhem; the journey from one genre to another is satisfying and surprisingly fresh considering that it's set in a familiar version of gothic London among equally familiar monsters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Charlotte and James Norbury, abandoned to the servants' care by their father after their mother's death, grow up relying on each other on the decaying estate of Aiskew in Yorkshire. James, an aspiring poet, moves to London in 1892 and finds his only real friend in young aristocrat Christopher Paige. But then James vanishes suddenly, compelling Charlotte to search for her brother in an unfamiliar city. She soon uncovers a frightening connection between her brother's disappearance and the Aegolius Club, a mysterious, exclusive society whose members are not only elite and powerful but also extremely dangerous. Owen's debut is an intriguing blend of historical, gothic, and supernatural fiction. Readers will be especially engaged by the author's memorable characters, particularly Adeline, a tightrope walker-turned-avenger, and her partner Shadwell. Owen's wonderful atmospheric writing is evocative of Victorian London. VERDICT Though abrupt transitions to a different point of view and time period detract from the flow of the story, this will appeal to devotees of the macabre and gothic set in the Victorian period, especially those who enjoy Charles Palliser's Rustication and David Morrell's Murder as a Fine Art. [See Prepub Alert, 12/16/13.]-Barbara Clark-Greene, Groton P.L., CT (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.