Quick (Owen) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
[R]eaders 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.... 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.
Andrew Sean Greer - New York Times Book Review
 

[A] creepy debut...a thrilling tale.... This book will give you chills even on a hot day
Minneapolis Star Tribune


Forget Jack the Ripper—it’s the curiously pale aristocratic types you need to beware of in this supernatural Gothic nightmare.... Owen’s stylishly sinister world of betrayal and Lovecraftian monsters will have you sleeping with the lights on.
Oprah Magazine
 

The first quarter of this debut novel is a lovely, poetic tale.... The last half is entirely bonkers and totally unexpected. Read it with the lights on.
New Republic
 
 
The book’s energy, its wide reach and rich detail make it a confident example of the "unputdownable" novel.
Economist


(Starred review.) Owen sets her seductive book in 1892, in a late-Victorian London with a serious vampire problem..... [A]n old-fashioned, leisurely pace,...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.
Publishers Weekly


An intriguing blend of historical, gothic, and supernatural fiction.... [The Quick features] wonderful atmospheric writing.
Library Journal


An intricate, sinister epic....an impressive feat....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.
Booklist


An elegantly written gothic epic that begins with children isolated in a lonely manor house.... 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.
Kirkus Reviews