Jered Mabaquiao
I grew up in a fairly conservative evangelical denomination. It was common to hear things like, “your body is a temple” or “the Holy Spirit lives in you.” This language shaped a lot of my thinking—ideas about what sort of vessel I was (or becoming) sometimes flooded my mind. Surrounded by congregants, even family members, that deliberately or implicitly, reminded me of my shortcomings, I wondered how would my soul ever be saved? While a lot of time and space has appropriately put distance between myself and these thoughts, Hannah Whitten’s Reliquary (2026) resurrects an important question for me: “What would you do to save your soul?”
A reliquary is a special container meant to hold and display holy or divine relics, often from saints or other significant religious historical figures. Whitten’s Reliquary reframes this object by asking what it means for a body to be a vessel for something divine and what happens to our “original soul” when it is replaced by something else. Whitten transforms the idea of the reliquary into something intimate and unsettling: an exploration of a body asked to house a divine terror; a relinquishing of one’s agency to a higher power. The novel’s exploration reanimates my own long-standing question of how a person learns to distinguish salvation from surrender.
Meeting Claire, Our Protagonist
Whitten is most widely known for her fantasy trilogy, The Nightshade Crown (2023-25) and the dark romance duology with The Wilderwood series (2021-22). With Reliquary, she shifts her genre work to horror, in a novel that combines gothic, religious, and cosmic horror, with a healthy dash of class commentary. Reliquary follows Claire Sutherland, whose fiancé, Elias, has died due to a mysterious series of brain aneurysms. Having lost her parents in a childhood boating accident, Claire is invited to mourn with Elias’s family—the Ashburys—on their remote island. Elias was next in line to inherit the Ashbury family company, “Ashbury Marinography,” a sort of biotechnic-capitalist company with a vague purpose of researching “deep ocean” characteristics with their highly successful submarine production line.
Claire is manipulated by the Ashburys while she searches for answers about Elias’s death and stumbles upon the dark secrets of the Ashbury family. It’s revealed that the Ashburys’ deadly alliance with an ancient, monstrous, and powerful entity grants them intergenerational material wealth and success so long as they sacrifice victims assuaging the entity’s insatiable hunger. Claire is chosen as the next vessel to be possessed by this godly monster of the ocean.
Soul-saving as Surrender and Survival
Claire’s predicament sharpens my question: What does it mean to save the soul when the body has already been marked for use by others? The horror of Reliquary lies in how survival becomes entangled with surrender. In the third act of the book, Wellington Ashbury the Sixth (Ash), a character who is wonderfully ambivalent, remarks, “Gods need that you know. Worship. Fear.” Ash describes the difference between a God and a Monster: “that’s the difference between the two, I guess. Worship. What’s a god no one knows about? Nothing.” Reliquary combines these elements and asks, “when fear, worship, and longing converge, what remains of the soul to save?”
Recalling my own instances of worship in sanctuaries with stained glass, Reliquary invokes this combination of fear, worship, and belonging. Sitting in the pews of a small rural church, the blending together of colors from the stained-glass windows always caught my attention due to the beauty and the hued spectacle. This decoration could be a distraction. This distraction wasn’t only from the monotonous preaching at the pulpit but perhaps also a distraction from the burden of belonging that I felt in such a space.
The people around me watched as I grew up but had never fully represented themselves as figures that cared for me. As the morning light shifted to the late afternoon, the light from the stained-glass windows, felt (at the time) as grace, never entirely reached me. This distance between worship and fear is precisely what Reliquary understands so well. The appearance of salvation can still leave a person spiritually unfulfilled.
In this sense, this performance of care, by the Ashburys, involves successfully orchestrating Claire as a sacrifice to the monster. Claire is persuaded by the promise of a community and of a life that she’s always wanted. Claire, perhaps, represents how we so oftentimes relinquish our own promises of belonging for something that is inherently empty.
Belonging and Susceptibility
Strong elements of post-feminist horror, religious unease, and social critique make Reliquary distinct. As our female protagonist, Claire critically navigates the gendered space of the Ashbury estate. As shown early on, we see Claire’s personal history riddled with unconfronted childhood trauma. Dr. Lark, Claire’s therapist, suggests that Claire should reclaim her sense of self and address the moments of emotional manipulation with her fiancé. Dr. Lark suggests to Claire, “you know you don’t have to go looking for security. You know you can find it in yourself. That your life has meaning just by virtue of being. It doesn’t have to be given weight by someone else.” Dr. Lark’s statement reveals how Claire must reckon with her personal emptiness or risk always searching for external validation and permission to just be.
It’s this conversation that significantly frames Claire’s anxieties as she travels to the Ashbury estate. We see that the family’s wealth and secrecy turn Claire’s grief into a mechanism of control. The Ashbury family adds layers of ritualism, inheritance, and subtle coercion to the inherent stresses of navigating family politics. The architecture of Harrow Point evokes the structure of a place of worship, a sanctuary, a temple. Set against my earlier sense of the body as a temple, and the body as a vessel for the divine, Harrow Point and Claire’s embodiment suggest what we do when a temple is no longer a site of refuge but a site of invasion.
Harrow Point as Body and Temple
Claire mentions that “Harrow Point was a sprawling gothic monstrosity of a house, turreted and gabled and dark against the blue sky behind. It appeared to be built into the side of the island, the spires of it artfully emerging from the ground as if they’d grown there.” In this moment in Reliquary, Whitten turns architecture into argument, using the house to reflect the submerged pressures shaping Claire’s experience. The estate’s scale and placement make visible the unstable boundary between spectacle and entrapment that runs throughout the novel. The description continues, “Below the spires, facing the open ocean, windows pocked the rock face of the cliff, the tide line lapping against the topmost sills. Were it nighttime instead of midday, Claire was sure she’d see more windows below the water’s surface, the house descending into the sea.” The setting also sharpens the novel’s attention to hierarchy, especially as Claire moves through a space defined by wealth, lineage, and exclusion.
Matriarchal Manipulations
Claire meets Audrey Ashbury, the matriarch of the family, whose composure is central to the novel’s tension. Audrey receives Claire as they fly out to Harrow Point. Audrey embodies a form of power that appears elegant, maternal, and reassuring even as it threatens to absorb Claire entirely. The Ashburys’ overwhelming high-class position is disorienting for Claire, but Audrey’s (performative) motherly instinct helps make Claire more comfortable as the situation at Harrow Point slowly unfolds. This disorientation becomes one of Audrey’s greatest advantages, since care and control in the novel are repeatedly made interchangeable. Audrey’s appeal lies in how convincingly she makes submission look like care.
Whitten effectively shows how manipulation often arrives in the language of intimacy (or acts of worship) rather than force. The interplay between preying and praying is crucial to understanding the narrative dynamics as themes of weakness and frailty are depicted through Claire’s point of view. This doubleness gives the novel much of its force, revealing how religious language and familial affection can weaken personal strength and resistance. The combination of Claire’s childhood trauma, the death of Elias, and the overwhelming nature of the Ashbury family digs a deeper hole in Claire leaving her even more vulnerable to manipulation.
Soul-saving and Reclamation
By the novel’s end, what Claire finally resists is an entire logic that tells her emptiness can be cured by surrendering herself to an outside power. Whitten makes clear that the horror of Reliquary is what seeks to inhabit and redefine us. Ultimately, Reliquary observes how, through forms of emptiness, readers are made desperate for something that disregards our own boundaries, plays with our fears, anxieties, and exacerbates our inherent hollowness. In the final act, we see how Claire’s hollowness makes space for the entity to possess her, but it’s through her own willpower that she expels this evil in an attempt to save herself. Inasmuch as I have grown out of a fear of damnation and have, by evangelical accounts, fallen out of divinity’s reach, Reliquary reveals what could happen when we take our own critical accountability and become our own saving grace.
Hannah Whitten’s Reliquary will be published on August 11, 2026, by Hachette Books.
Jered Mabaquiao (he/him) is a Filipino-American, PhD Candidate in the English department at the University of Texas at Arlington. He also teaches rhetoric and composition, and American literature classes at Dallas College. Jered also serves as an executive board member for the Dallas Asian American Historical Society which works on building Asian American communities in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Previously a fellow for the Crossing Latinidades research initiative, Jered works broadly on projects interrogating racial melancholia, identity, and trauma in racialized narratives. His current project underscores political and financial economies, psychosocial politics, and popular culture in Asian American entertainment media.
