The terror of atomic war, a paranoid arms race, a stark divide between rich and poor — in The Originals, L.E. Vollick's debut novel, Reagan-era legacies such as these are seen from the perspective of nightclub subculture and the food bank. Magpie Smith confronts a street-level zeitgeist of fatalism in the early 1990s, bringing to life in the process a dysfunctional family of disenfranchised youth, from Benny, the self-glamorizing drug dealer to Jackson, the overprotective bouncer at the Underground.
When Jackson brutally beats a would-be thief at the club, Magpie must rethink her allegiances. Through a haze of illness, inebriation and LSD, what becomes increasingly clear is that individual interests are beginning to blow the solidarity of the Underground apart. Vexed by the disappearance of her friend and intellectual guide, PK, Magpie tries to hold things together, but is led increasingly to question the fragile foundations of both her own small world and the larger one.
L.E. Vollick was born in Parry Sound, Ontario, and lived in Edmonton before relocating to Toronto and Montreal. She received a B.A. in creative writing and women's studies from York University, and an M.A. in the creative writing stream of English at Concordia University, Montreal. Currently she is a Ph.d candidate in English at McGill University.
Vollick has published poetry and fiction in The WIER Tap Anthology (1992), dig: a journal for poetry (1994), Existere Magazine (1992-94), and The Headlight Anthology (1999, 2000). A chapter of The Originals appeared in Matrix Magazine (Fall, 2000). She was awarded first prize in the 1997 Robbie Burns Poetry Contest out of York University. The Originals is her first novel.
"I'm not exaggerating when I say that The Originals could be the Catcher in the Rye of our generation."
— Hour, Montreal, March 2002
"What sets The Originals apart from so many other novels about malcontent, clubbing youth — aside from the author's arresting prose — is the fact that Vollick has firmly rooted her novel in the political context of the 1980s and 1990s... In The Originals, character and context are indivisible, which makes the story simultaneously universal and deeply personal."
— Clelia Scala, Paper Plates, 2003
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