Elias died on a Tuesday, and the aneurysm that killed him is shaped like tentacles on the scan. That is page four of Reliquary by Hannah Whitten, and the neurologist’s actual worry is not the tentacles. It is the older lesions scattered through the rest of the brain, scarring that has been there since childhood, damage a man should not have been walking around with. Claire Sutherland, twenty-six and about to be twenty-seven, cannot help him. She and her fiance never really talked about their childhoods.
Four Days, Four Stations
A week later, a handwritten note arrives on gilt-edged paper. The Ashburys, whom Claire has never met in five years of being engaged to their son, would love her to come to Harrow Point, the family home on a private island off the coast of Maine, from the fourth of May to the seventh, to celebrate Elias’s life. They send a jet. Elias’s mother takes her shopping at Saks and calls her ma fille. They throw her a birthday party in a house whose grand staircase leads down rather than up.
The four days have names, and Claire does not learn them until it is too late to matter: Arrival, Anticipation, Acceptance, Ascension. Ashbury Marinography builds deep-sea submarines, and it has been extraordinarily lucky with them, because a hundred and twenty years ago a man made a bargain with something in the water.
Reliquary by Hannah Whitten is her first horror novel after two romantasy series, and it announces the change of register immediately. This is a wet, teeth-forward book. It is also, structurally, quite a sly one.
The Real Horror Is the Hospitality
The single most effective thing in Reliquary by Hannah Whitten is not a tentacle. It is the way the Ashburys talk.
They call her honey. They tell her she is one of them, that they always wanted a daughter, that they are so glad she agreed to be part of this. And they apologise to her for her loss, over and over, as though grief were a job she has been hired to do. Every time Claire’s instincts start to shift, someone touches her shoulder and says that’s our girl, and the instinct lies back down. The book is completely explicit that this is the mechanism: the family selects people who will ignore red flags, and it makes the reader watch a lonely woman be love-bombed into a trap in real time. Anyone who has read about coercive control will find the technique horribly familiar, and Whitten never once has to raise her voice about it.
The other genuine achievement is Claire’s narration. She has spent fourteen years hollowing herself out on purpose, keeping her feelings at enough of a remove that they cannot hit anything vital, and Whitten writes that as prose style rather than backstory. At the worst moments the sentences go flat, administrative, almost bored. When something unbearable happens, Claire itemises the room. It is a very difficult trick and it works.
What Works
Four things make Reliquary by Hannah Whitten worth the hardback.
- The chapter headings do the plot. The five opening sections are titled dead, men, tell, no, lies. Later, day 1 and day 2 give way to station 3 and station 4, and at the climax the header itself corrupts into machine noise. It is a gimmick, and it is genuinely unsettling.
- The body horror is rationed. A knot at the base of a servant’s neck. A driver’s misshapen wrist. Whitten lets those sit for two hundred pages before she cashes them, and the cashing is worth the wait.
- Nobody is redeemed. The love interest is a stalker who once hit Claire with a car, the book knows it, and it refuses to launder him. The final pages go somewhere much stranger and meaner than the escape ending the setup implies.
- The tackle chest. The flashback that explains what a thirteen-year-old did to a radio, and what she promised a voice in the water, is four pages long and the best writing in the novel.
Where It Stumbles
Four things hold Reliquary by Hannah Whitten back from the top of the year’s horror, and only one of them is pacing.
- The middle stalls. Roughly a hundred pages of dinners, a yacht trip and a boozy cousin being cryptic, during which the reader is miles ahead of Claire. The dramatic irony is deliberate; it is still a long stretch of watching someone fail to notice.
- The god is thin. A character says “tentacles and shit, you know the drill”, and that is more or less the level of invention on offer. The novel is not curious about its Leviathan as a thing in itself, only as a machine for producing sacrifice.
- The mythology arrives as a lecture. A century of family history gets delivered in one conversation on a staircase, complete with a helpfully vomiting narrator to explain why nobody could just say it sooner.
- The uncles blur. Patrick, Greg and Wellsley are three rich men with the same eyes and roughly one personality between them, and the book needs at least one of them to be a person.
Content, and Who This Is For
A Word on Content Warnings
Reliquary by Hannah Whitten is not a book to hand anyone unprepared. Cannibalism, on the page and repeatedly. Sustained body horror including partial evisceration. Gore. Stalking and a hit-and-run treated with some sympathy. Drugging without consent. A coerced marriage and the threat of coerced sex. Parental and sibling death, drowning, and a suicidal bargain made by a child. There is no explicit sex; this is horror, not romance, whatever the pairing suggests.
Who Should Read Reliquary by Hannah Whitten
Reach for it if you like gothic horror where the monster is a family office, if the words seaside cult make you sit up, or if you have ever made yourself smaller to keep a place at someone’s table. Skip it if cannibalism is a hard line, or if you want a cosmology with rules that hold together under pressure.
What to Read After Reliquary by Hannah Whitten
- Tenderly, I Am Devoured by Lyndall Clipstone. The nearest neighbour on our shelves: a girl bound to a sea-thing, the same salt-soaked romantic dread.
- Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner. For readers who want the body horror louder and the ecology stranger.
- A Box Full of Darkness by Simone St. James. If the appeal is a woman walking willingly into a rich family’s secret.
- The Reformatory by Tananarive Due. A masterclass in the thing Whitten is reaching for: institutional evil rendered as the supernatural.
- Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. The quieter, sadder version of a person coming back from the deep as something else.
The Last Word on Reliquary by Hannah Whitten
There is a version of this novel that takes its god seriously and is much less interesting for it. What Whitten has actually written is a book about a woman who was taught, at thirteen, that the safest thing to be is empty, and who then spent fourteen years perfecting it until she was exactly the shape a monster needed. The horror is not that something is waiting in the water. It is that being wanted felt so much like being loved that she could not tell the difference until she was on the altar. The last twenty pages hand her something better than survival, which is appetite. Not a happy ending. A hungry one.
