The Quick by Lauren Owen
526 pages
Published 2014
Read from October 6 to October 11
Rating: 4 out of 5
Short stories have broken my heart within an efficiency of pages—James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" (reviewed here) comes to mind. The Quick, however, might be the very first novel to have me bawling my eyes out within the first ten pages.
I've been wanting to read this book essentially since it came out; I found it on the new books shelf at my former local library and was immediately taken with its cover. This month, I've been feeling an urge to read horror, something I say every October, but this time I'm finally acting on it to some extent. The Quick seemed like the perfect place to begin.
In a Late Victorian London populated with enough vampires to round out several competing factions, bloodshed and grisly deaths can be found in spades, yet The Quick seems less interested in being chilling than in finding the tragedy woven throughout. It never again quite broke my heart with the same intensity it did in the beginning (though the last chapter came close), but sadness pervaded the novel like fog. It is a total bummer of a novel—but a beautiful bummer that earns every heartbreak.
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