James Norbury and his sister, Charlotte, live in an old, spacious Yorkshire house. Except for a few employees, the children are alone; Mother is dead, Father is usually away. 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 from Oxford, James goes to London. He fancies himself a nascent poet, staying in to work on his writing while his roommate parties and drinks. On his way to deliver a copy of his finished play to Oscar Wilde, James is stopped by a stranger who claims to be an "admirer." The man 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 1868. In his notebook, Augustus Mould writes about his friend Edmund and the exclusive Aegolius Club, which 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. 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. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher