Relics Unearths Fresh Horrors from Beneath London

Now, in Relics, Tim Lebbon has imbued the city with his own brand of danger. Lebbon’s past books have ably threaded the sci-fi/horror needle, and he continues in that vein here, but this one makes its mark as a slow-burn thriller rather than a stem-to-stern roller coaster ride. The bloodletting doesn’t begin for quite some time, and its eventual appearance bifurcates Relics into two entirely different, equally satisfying stories.
We begin with an intimate crime drama: Angela and Vince are two people almost sickeningly in love. She is a student and researcher of criminal science. He works in real estate. They’re soulmates, we’re told. Unfortunately for Angela, they’re soulmates with secrets. She finds this out when Vince goes AWOL, without a word. The only clue she receives is a cryptic goodbye letter, stuffed through the mailbox and intended to snuff her budding investigation into Vince’s whereabouts.
It turns out the study of criminals is a real asset when embarking upon real shoe-leather sleuthing, and Angela soon uncovers bits and pieces of Vince’s side job: hunting for arcane artifacts, remnants of a magical era long since passed (or so it is thought).
While tracking down unicorn horns and other mystic black market antiquities, Vince fell in with a bad crowd, and it’s finally caught up to him, and what started as a hobby has resulted in serious consequences. Of course, the truth hidden within this tangled web comes to Angela in dribs and drabs, and only after she’s fallen in with one of London’s most notorious crime lords, Fat Frederick, and Lilou, an otherworldly beauty with ties to Vince’s current predicament.
This is where the second half of the book kicks off with a splash, and a brutal supernatural murder. To find Vince, Angela will assemble an unusual squad of humans, nymphs, pixies, and more, and delve into underbelly of an ancient conflict. The bodies pile up as the stakes rise ever higher, and without spoiling the finer points of the plot, I can safely say Lebbon has opened up a world with enough depth to be explored in great detail in future novels.
As the story reaches its climax, it gains a cinematic fervor, like Raiders of the Lost Ark filtered through the lenses of Clive Barker. A narrative style suited to the big screen should come as no surprise; Lebbon’s catalog includes a fair few movie novelizations, including, recently, Kong: Skull Island.
Relics puts all of his storytelling skills to use, and subsequently flourishes, a smoldering ember that, in the briefest of flashes, transfigures into a Roman candle, bright, flashy, and determined, with a breakneck ending that almost guarantees this isn’t the last time we’ll venture beneath the suburbs of London.
Relics is available now.