I, like (possibly) many, picked up Glenn Diaz’s The Quiet Ones expecting a sucker-punch thriller. A call-center agent wanted for embezzling from the American company for which he mans the phones. An introductory chapter that brings a straight-from-a-movie manhunt scene to mind. The Quiet Ones is a thriller.

But it isn’t.

In a few flips, what started as an eerie, potentially heart-throbbing, thriller mellows into the terrestrial. The Quiet Ones eases into the mundane before, in between, and around the heist. If anything, The Quiet Ones is a retelling of the contemporary, globalized, capitalist society. There is no unilinear solid plot. The book is a compilation of multiple moments from its various characters – a montage on their mornings, their evenings, their love affairs, and everything in between. These moments are enveloped between a society that glorifies profit over well-being, ostracizes the poor, and shuns the non-heteronormative – a backdrop not too foreign from our reality.

While a compelling exposition, The Quiet Ones lacks a weighty narrative anchor. But what it lacks in this vein, it makes up for its brilliant prose. Personally, its prose is its saving grace. Diaz has woven his words artfully and has made the banal tantalizing and captivating. There where multiple instances when reading this book where I had to pause as I was taken aback at how masterful a sentence was strung. His writing has transformed the seemingly directionless sequences into immersive experiences on love, heartbreak, loneliness, among others.

Diaz, in The Quiet Ones, humanizes the dystopian mundane – and he does it beautifully.

Rating: 4 / 5