Most people would put an aquarium in their living room. But the Ashburys aren’t most people. They’ve put their living room in an aquarium.
At Harrow Point, their ancestral mansion on a private island off the coast of Maine, Gothic spires and gables rise from the rocky cliffs as if the house has grown right out of the island. Much of it has, in a manner of speaking. Windows puncture the stone all the way down to the waterline, with even more hidden beneath the waves. Staircases wind deeper and deeper into the stone, past grotesque mermaid statues with claws and teeth, through corridors where footsteps echo against the walls. Rippling reflections dance across the furniture and suggest that the water has seeped into the house.
It becomes impossible to ignore that the house has several stories’ worth of ocean pressing against it. At the bottom, enormous doors open onto a chamber that’s part cathedral, part fish tank, and wholly preposterous. Six balconies, lined with rows of identical doors, overlook a grand room furnished with heavy chairs, couches, and a long dining table. Opposite them, an enormous wall of windows frames a world of shifting light and fathomless dark and reveals the Atlantic, where schools of silvery fish seem happy to drift on by, though there’s no telling what else might swim up for a closer look — or decide to come in.
But the most dangerous things at Harrow Point might be the ones already inside.
The Ashburys are perfectly at home beneath the sea. But for Claire Sutherland, whose claustrophobia makes the descent through all that stone almost physically unbearable, the view comes with a sneaking suspicion that the Ashburys are more interested in watching her than they are in watching the fish. For people with so much to hide, the Ashburys have built a remarkably revealing home.
Hannah Whitten’s “Reliquary” gives readers good reason to be suspicious of the whole place. The book has just about everything a Gothic nightmare could ask for — an isolated island, religious fanaticism, something ravenous lurking, enough intergenerational scheming to make the Roy family look like a reasonably functional household — and Whitten makes excellent use of each and every one of those things. Her move from fantasy to horror turns out to be a great use of her imagination; she has written a novel that’s as grotesque as it is gorgeous, with enough unsettling imagery to make a perfectly ordinary bathtub seem like an invitation to certain death. The book’s body horror is magnificent; the nautical mythology is marvelous; and the Ashburys are the kind of family that might make even the world’s most adept social climber think again about the advantages of marrying rich.
Unfortunately for Claire Sutherland, she’s tailor-made for them.
Claire has spent much of her life wanting exactly what the Ashburys appear to be so eager to offer her: a family. She was orphaned by a boating accident that killed her parents and sister when she was in seventh grade, and she has grown into a lonely, deeply insecure woman who has learned to expect very little from life. Then she meets Elias — a handsome, fabulously wealthy heir to the Ashbury’s marine technology fortune — who sweeps her up into a relationship that seems almost too good to be true. He provides her with the stability that she has always wanted, though he’s also reluctant to discuss his family and lets their engagement stretch on and on without a wedding date. And then… he dies suddenly of a mysterious neurological condition, leaving Claire alone once again.
Enter Audrey, Elias’ mother, who invites Claire to attend a three-day wake at Harrow Point. Never mind the fact that the Ashburys seem uninterested in actually mourning Elias or that his older brother, Ash, is practically begging Claire to leave. She’s conveniently willing to ignore any less-than-subtle warning signs. And if the family’s behavior occasionally suggests they’re harboring some deep, dark secret(s), well, surely rich people are entitled to a few quicks — like insisting that everyone spends their wedding nights aboard the glass-paneled family submarine.
But as Claire soon discovers, marrying into the Ashbury family involves a lot more than promising to love, honor, and obey.
All in the family
The Ashburys have somehow managed to make generational wealth even more grotesque than it already is. At the center of the family’s considerable wealth is an ancient arrangement involving a human sacrifice here and there and a perverse understanding of religious devotion. The Ashburys have spent generations protecting their privilege, and they’ll do (just about) anything to preserve it. There are probably easier ways to go about adding to the family fortune, but apparently, diversification doesn’t have quite the same supernatural benefits. The Ashburys have everything money can buy, and their “faith” has convinced them that the things money can’t buy are theirs for the taking, too. They’re protecting their family, honoring their ancestors, fulfilling their obligations. The novel’s Lovecraftian mythology is at its most interesting when the monstrous and the mercenary are almost impossible to tell apart.
The book gradually dismantles Claire’s memories of Elias as the things she discovers at Harrow Point make her confront the possibility that she never really knew him in the first place. She loved him — certainly. She depended on him — absolutely. But how much of that love depended on only believing the many, exact things that he wanted her to believe? Claire can’t confront Elias, demand an explanation, or find out which parts of their relationship were genuine. She can’t even determine whether he was acting out of selfishness, guilt, real affection, or some combination of all three. She has to reconstruct a man who is no longer around to defend himself — or tell her another lie.
Ash fares somewhat better, although I wanted considerably more from him, too. He’s the family’s black sheep, a guilt-ridden man whose hostility toward his relatives conceals both complicity and resistance. He knows what the Ashburys are capable of because he’s been a participant in their world, and his attempts to help Claire don’t erase his guilt. He has enough contradictions and moral ambiguity to make him genuinely interesting and justify a much larger role in the story, and the relationship that develops between him and Claire has plenty of potential. But their developing quasi-kinda-sorta romance doesn’t live up to its promise. Whitten is so good at making readers feel the presence of an ancient horror that it’s a tiny bit disappointing how much less convincingly she writes the attraction between two ordinary humans.
The book’s title becomes considerably more sinister once the family’s plans for Claire come entirely into focus. A reliquary is something that holds something considered sacred, traditionally the remains or possessions of a saint. The Ashburys have a more literal (and macabre) interpretation in mind. The family can call a sacrifice “holy” as much as it likes, but there’s nothing particularly sacred about forcing somebody else to pay for your salvation. Whitten takes the familiar religious language to the extreme, where belonging to something greater than yourself can mean that you also cease to belong to yourself.
Claire wants a family that will never leave her. That works for the Ashburys. They’re prepared to make absolutely certain she never leaves them.
Survival of the meekest
Claire is an interesting choice for a main character because she’s almost pathologically incapable of making a decision that might inconvenience somebody else. The horror genre’s “final girl” usually survives because she recognizes danger, adapts, and fights back. Claire notices freaky details, briefly finds them suspicious, and then convinces herself that she’s overreacting. That’s an interesting approach for a horror protagonist, particularly in a story related to bodily autonomy and free will.
Sure, Whitten has a good reason for making Claire so reluctant to take control of herself: Her passivity is central to the novel’s psychological ambitions. But there’s a big difference between understanding why someone acts in a certain way and finding that behavior fun to read about.
Claire’s grief and loneliness explain her desperation to belong, yes, but they make up so much of her personality that there’s very little left to her. Her self-deprecation becomes repetitive, and her inability to recognize any of the danger makes it difficult to sympathize with her. Whitten clearly knows how to write complicated, contradictory people. But Claire seems to exist almost entirely in relation to what other people want from her. What does she want when she isn’t trying to make somebody love her? What makes her angry, happy, scared, or sad? What sort of person was she before any of the Ashburys? Who might she become? While Claire is an excellent choice for the Ashburys’ intended victim, I just wish she’d been a more interesting woman before they chose her.
Still, I was far too engrossed in Harrow Point’s horrors to be bothered by every questionable decision. Whitten has an extraordinary appetite for all of the horror genre’s grotesque possibilities — things writhe, swell, split, and transform. Her prose is lush and full of salt, water, bloody entrails, rotting flesh; bodies are subjected to all manner of unnatural indignities; and the ocean is home to creatures that have only a passing resemblance to those in a marine biology textbook. Whitten’s imagery is frequently stomach-turning, occasionally beautiful — and always impossible to look away from.
Claire’s eventual autonomy arrives a little too quickly, but Whitten leaves her protagonist with an intriguingly untidy future. What she has endured at the Ashburys’ has changed her in ways that can’t simply be undone. There’s a lingering uneasiness in that metamorphosis — and in the possibilities Whitten leaves open after the immediate horrors have passed. Claire arrives at Harrow Point staring through enormous windows at a world that makes her feel small and powerless. By the final pages, her own reflection may be the strangest sight of all.
