Vince and Angela are just your average happy couple living in London. She’s a grad student, he works for a real estate company, and they have a cozy apartment and a great sex life. Except, of course, for the fact that Vince is living a double life as a collector of magical artifacts for one of the local crime bosses, and by “magical artifacts” I mean “pieces of magical creatures”. Angela is blissfully unaware of this state of affairs until Vince suddenly goes missing, leaving behind only a couple of cryptic messages and the faintest of trails, one which Angela is determined to pursue no matter what.
Such is the setup for Tim Lebbon’s novel Relics, the first in a planned trilogy. Less straight-up horror and more a thriller with urban fantasy and horror elements, the book follows Angela’s attempts to locate Vince, as well as Vince’s efforts to reconnect with her and do something about the massive can of worms that he’s opened by playing around too much in the supernatural collector community.
Because, it turns out, not all of the magical creatures are dead and gone. Some still haunt London’s streets, and it’s an intersection with one of them that sends Vince, Angela, Vince’s mobster employer and more spiraling into bloody chaos. Because some of London’s magical creatures are tired of being hunted and needing to hide, and they’re about to start fighting back.
Lebbon does a great job of letting the reader share in Angela’s confusion and paranoia from the beginning. As she dives deeper into Vince’s world and rubs up against some of the less savory people in it, she’s forced to question everything she knows about both her boyfriend and reality itself, and this sense of unmooring is communicated effectively to the reader. Vince’s deeper world is revealed to the reader and Angela at the same time, and so her paranoia and determination both feel earned.
As an elegant side note, Lebbon does a good job of noting how violence doesn’t stay contained, and how it can spill out onto friends and loved ones regardless of one’s best intentions. Despite Vince’s efforts to keep his double life secret, it reaches out and inflicts harm on Angela; Angela’s investigations likewise risk putting her utterly mundane best friend in harm’s way. Violence begets violence, blood begets blood, and the simple task Vince thought he was signing on for quickly and inevitably leads to an ever-increasing body count.
The back half of the book leans less heavily on horror and discovery and more on action, as the various threads weave together for a bloody finale that redraws battle lines even while conclusively wrapping up the events of the book. Lebbon effectively sets up the rest of his trilogy without skimping on the action, and the distinct touches he adds to what could have been a rote fight scene give it life.
Fans of Lebbon’s more traditional horror work may find the scares and gore a little light, though there’s multiple nods in that direction. Readers looking for something where the grue greases the skids of the action will find the ride enjoyable, and the setting and characters are engaging enough to generate eager anticipation for book 2.
(Titan, 2017)
