Reliquary
Hannah Whitten
Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0316579537
Hachette Book Group: Run For It, August 2026, 432 pages

Greetings, readers, and welcome back to another book review! This month, we’re repressing our emotions, burying our past, and staring out at the impenetrable depths of the sea where chthonic horrors may or may not be lurking in Reliquary, a combination body horror/eat the rich offering from Hannah Whitten!

. . . I totally got you this time on the intro, but that is what this book is actually about, and it’s really good. Reliquary follows the perspective of Claire, a woman who lost her family in a boating accident when she was young, and more recently lost her wealthy fiancé and his weird tentacular pet in a series of circumstances she doesn’t really want to think too hard about, and now all of a sudden she’s been invited to said former fiancé’s family island to observe a three-day wake that surely will not involve anything horrible happening to anyone present.

Spoiler alert: All sorts of horrible things happen, but that’s what you get when you abandon your humanity.

Reliquary reminded me a lot of a classic H.P. Lovecraft short story (minus the excessive racism), and the feeling of creeping dread Whitten conjures forth is present from page one all the way through to the denouement. There is a bare skein of humanity draping this story, the gossamer wisps of reality clothing its shape, but the true bones and marrow are those of boneless creatures that scuttle beneath lightless depths, far beyond our sight and comprehension. Claire has to deal with some shit, and Whitten does a fantastic job of blending the otherworldly with the banality of everyday life that keeps the reader in a constant state of “did I just read that?” not usually seen in modern literature.

The other thing this story does really well is evoke the feel of the sea and the various layers it contains. When Claire first arrives at the island on which the majority of the book takes place, it’s like wading into the shallow depths of the shore, waves crashing all around, the comforting feel of sand still underfoot. There is a sense of adventure, but also a promise that you can retreat if necessary, find your way back to dry land, have some drinks with your friends, and lie out on the towels everyone brought.

Then, you find yourself dragged a little bit further out with each wave, each strange ritual your now-adopted family insists is normal pulling you further away from shore as you laugh in the swell, until all of a sudden you reach down with your foot. There’s nothing there and your mind can’t help but fill the darkness beneath your feet with millennia’s worth of nightmares and hooooo boy are there some horrors there waiting for you to acknowledge them.

This feeling of the unknown, the inexplicable, is what Whitten manages to evoke in both word and feeling throughout the entire novel, and I thoroughly enjoyed every tense turn of the page. If you don’t like scary stories, this is definitely not one you should read, but I cannot recommend it enough. Reliquary is unsettling, it’s inhuman, but at its core it is a mirror held to the primordial parts of humanity we like to pretend don’t exist anymore, yet are all too prevalent in our modern society, particularly among the rich and powerful.

The abyss might stare back, but that doesn’t mean we can’t fight it.