The owls have always been in young James Norbury's nursery. He and his sister, Charlotte, live in Aiskew Hall, an old, spacious Yorkshire house. Mother is dead, Father is usually away. Except for the housekeeper and a few employees, the children are alone. One of their favorite pastimes is playing in the hidden "priest hole" behind the moveable bookcase in Father's library. One day he returns, only to die soon after. It's now that Lauren Owen's first novel, The Quick, really gets going, perfectly rendering the rich and moody Gothic world of late-19th-century London.
Years later, after graduating form Oxford, James goes to London and shares lodging with fellow classmate Christopher Paige. James, who fancies himself a nascent poet, stays in to work on his writing; Christopher parties and drinks, keeps late hours and arrives home smelling of wine and tobacco. Late one evening, their attraction for one another is undeniable and they kiss. James shudders, feeling as if a "gold-tipped arrow had finally found its mark."
When James finishes drafting a play, Christopher convinces him they should leave it on Oscar Wilde's doorstep that evening in the hopes the great writer will read it. On the way over, they're surprised by a stranger who tells James he's an "admirer" of his. The stranger suddenly attacks Christopher, his "teeth... at his throat." He then picks up James as if he were a piece of paper: "This won't take a minute." James felt cold, then as if he was away from himself, and finally alone.
Part Two takes us a few years back, to December 10, 1868. In his notebook, Augustus Mould writes about his friend Edmund and a very private London club named after an owl--the exclusive Aegolius Club has only 52 members. He writes, too, of how Edmund can enter his mind. It's a "cold feeling," a "sickening invasion."
Eventually, Charlotte comes to London to look for her missing brother, and the tale's labyrinthine turns all start to converge. Owen's achievement here is how intelligently she pulls together her disparate plots into a believable and fantastic whole. From "mazement" to "the exchange," from a rival gang of vampires to magic, Owen has created an intricate world in which the reader feels a part. Take the trip, if you dare, into a luscious Victorian London rendered by a gifted young British writer who seems weaned on equal parts Sherlock Holmes, Buffy Summers and Harry Potter. The sequel is sure to be just as delicious. --Tom Lavoie
Shelf Talker: This detailed, complex foray into the world of Victorian vampires from a new novelist is a dark tale of the dead and the Quick.