The Quick, Lauren Owen

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/books/review/the-quick-by-lauren-owen.html