RELIQUARY

Stand-alone horror from the author of the Nightshade Crown fantasy series.

After finding a love that was more than she’d ever hoped for, Claire Sutherland finds herself alone again. A boating accident left her a deeply traumatized orphan. A mysterious neurological ailment took her fiancé. When Elias’ mother invites her to their home for a memorial service, Claire hesitates at first. She’s never met any of Elias’ relatives because he wanted nothing to do with them. But the lure of family is too strong for Claire to resist, so she accepts the invitation to the Ashbury clan’s island compound. “Looming above everything like a dragon on its hoard,” Harrow Point is a massive assemblage of spires and gables carved into a cliff. What Claire doesn’t see from the outside is the labyrinthine rooms that spiral down into the dark depths of the ocean. Whitten has assembled all the essentials for a gothic novel. There’s an isolated and endangered heroine. There are family secrets that won’t stay hidden. And the setting is the perfect blend of the sublime and the uncanny. What this novel lacks is compelling characters and persuasive worldbuilding. There’s one character in this story who has depth, and it’s not the protagonist. It is, instead, Elias’ brother, Ash, and Claire’s refusal to recognize that he’s trying to help her gets annoying fast. She’s grieving, she longs to be part of a family again, and nothing she learned about Ash from Elias makes her inclined to trust her fiancé’s older brother. That said, Claire is dense to the point of being ridiculous and scenes that should be terrifying aren’t. One reason gothic novels are often set in the past is that this makes it easier for readers to suspend disbelief. Whitten’s contemporary setting means that the more the reader learns about the Ashbury family’s dark secrets, the less plausible they become.

What could have been an inventive gothic novel descends into something close to farce.