A woman stands in front of a fortune-telling machine at Coney Island holding a hot dog, and a handsome stranger feeds it a quarter on her behalf. The card reads: you will always go back to the ocean. She laughs and offers it to him. He goes white. Five years later he is dead of an aneurysm, and Reliquary by Hannah Whitten has already told the reader everything it intends to, in an opening that plays as meet-cute and functions as a snare closing.
The Table of Contents in Reliquary by Hannah Whitten Is a Threat
Before the first sentence, the contents page lists five sections: dead, men, tell, no, lies. Then DEEP. Then DEEPER. And then DROWNED. Individual chapters begin as day 1, afternoon and day 2, morning, and somewhere past the midpoint they quietly stop being days and become stations, numbered three and four, as though the book has been keeping a different calendar all along. At the climax the header itself degrades into corrupted characters and a bracketed shrug: somewhere, sometime.
It is a showy device. It also does real work, because the reader is being handed the shape of the trap several hundred pages before the heroine finds it, and the discomfort of that gap is the novel’s entire engine.
Claire Sutherland is twenty-six, freelances in social media, and has just lost the man she was going to marry. She has no family, one therapist she lies to by omission, and no close friends. His family, whom she has never met in five years, send a handwritten note on gilt-edged stationery inviting her to their island off the coast of Maine for four days to celebrate his life. They send a jet. His mother takes her shopping and calls her ma fille. And Ashbury Marinography, purveyors of luxury deep-sea submarines, has been having an extraordinary run of luck since 1902.
Kindness as a Hunting Technique
The most frightening passages in Reliquary by Hannah Whitten contain no monsters at all. They are shopping trips.
Within an hour of landing, the matriarch has walked Claire into Saks and instructed the staff to fetch a dress, shoes and a bag, then bought her lunch at a restaurant that does not print prices. She orders in French and refers to Claire, in front of the waiter, as her daughter. There is a surprise birthday cake waiting underground, and a two-thousand-dollar film camera wrapped in silver paper because Elias once mentioned she liked photography. An aunt tells her, on the way down a staircase carved into a cliff, that you can get used to anything if you have to. None of it reads as menace. All of it is.
Whitten is not coy about the mechanism, either. The family targets people who will talk themselves out of their own alarm, and the novel plants exit after exit that Claire declines to use, each one signposted so clearly that a reader wants to shout at the page. That is the design. The book is not asking whether she will notice; it is asking how much unearned warmth a lonely person will accept before the price arrives, and the answer is: nearly all of it.
Underneath sits the book’s real subject. Claire survived something at thirteen and has spent the years since hollowing herself out on purpose, keeping every feeling far enough from her body that it cannot strike anything vital. Whitten writes this as style rather than exposition: at the worst moments the sentences flatten into inventory, the narrator catalogues the wallpaper, the horror arrives in the same tone as the weather. It is a convincing rendering of the kind of dissociation that starts as survival and calcifies into a personality, and it means the novel’s climax is not an escape but a woman consenting to feel things again.
Four pages near the end of Reliquary by Hannah Whitten finally reveal what happened on her thirteenth birthday: a bored girl, a game of hide-and-seek, a stuck volume dial, and a bargain struck in the dark with something that answered. It is the best writing Whitten has published, and it recasts everything before it.
Where It Falters
Four things keep Reliquary by Hannah Whitten off the top shelf, and only one of them is a pacing problem.
- The second act idles. A hundred-odd pages of dinners, a yacht outing and a drunk relative being ominous, all while the reader waits for the heroine to catch up. Intentional, and still slow.
- The god is a device, not an idea. “Tentacles and shit, you know the drill,” says one character, and the book more or less agrees with him. It wants a machine for producing sacrifice, not a cosmology.
- A staircase full of exposition. A century of family history gets unloaded in one conversation on the stairs, with a built-in excuse for why nobody could mention it earlier.
- Interchangeable uncles. Three wealthy men with identical eyes and roughly one personality between them.
Set against that: the body horror is beautifully rationed. A knot on a servant’s neck, a driver’s badly healed wrist, a dead cephalopod in a living-room tank. Whitten lets those details sit for two hundred pages and then collects on all of them at once.
Where Reliquary by Hannah Whitten Leaves You
The romance, such as it is, belongs to a man who followed Claire for years and once put her in hospital with a car, and the novel deserves credit for refusing to launder him. He is not redeemed; he is merely the least appalling person on the island, and both he and the book know that the bar is subterranean.
What the ending offers instead of rescue is stranger and considerably nastier. A woman who has spent her life being emptied out decides what to put back in, and what she chooses is not peace. The final chapter, set more than a year later in a small Maine town with a waitressing job and a walk on the beach, is quietly one of the most unsettling things here: a heroine who has stopped being edible and started being hungry.
Before starting, readers should know what is in here: people eating people, in detail and more than once; a scene of partial evisceration; sedation administered against a character’s will; a wedding nobody consents to; and a thirteen-year-old offering up her life. The pairing at the centre never becomes explicit. This is horror wearing romance as a coat.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Readers who took to Reliquary by Hannah Whitten tend to want one of two things next: more salt, or more teeth. The closest match on our shelves is Tenderly, I Am Devoured by Lyndall Clipstone, which shares the salt, the dread and the girl bound to something in the water. Anyone who wants the body horror turned up should try Girl in the Creek by Wendy N. Wagner, and readers after the same oceanic scale with a bleaker heart will find it in Angel Down by Daniel Kraus. Beyond that, Julia Armfield’s Our Wives Under the Sea is the quieter companion piece about someone returning from the deep as something else, and Tananarive Due’s The Reformatory is the model for what Whitten is attempting when she makes institutional greed wear a supernatural face. Whitten’s own backlist, the Wilderwood and Nightshade Crown books, will not prepare anyone for this one, which is rather the point.