BOOK REVIEW | PREACHING TO THE CHOIR | ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

 

BOOK REVIEW | PREACHING TO THE CHOIR | ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY

About The Book

Knives Out meets Ready or Not when a family gathering in an English mansion devolves into horror in a chilling novella from the “Master of British Sci-Fi” (Reactor)

Elena Mendes thought she understood what “old money” was.

She knew her boyfriend Ross Enderbough was rich. Like, “old money” rich. She knew he was the scion of some eccentric British line that predates the whole United States. She knew he didn’t really get on with his family, and that he fled to America to study free of their influence.

Ross has been summoned to Enderby, the family mansion built as a monastery centuries ago, for an exclusive, mysterious family gathering that happens only once a generation. Spouses and partners aren’t invited, but Ross has asked Elena to come anyway for moral support.

But there are secrets in the mouldering old pile, and terrors in the unkempt woods on the estate. And Elena slowly comes to realise that “old money” means so much more than she’d ever imagined…

Review

They’re kooky and really kind of spooky, but they are definitely not The Addams Family.

Joining her posh boyfriend Ross for a weekend family gathering Elena Mendes discovers that every family has secrets, and some secrets are meant to be buried.

The powerful dynastic family hiding dark secrets has been a literary staple for like ….ever, from literary fiction to horror, and with Preaching to the Choir, Adrian Tchaikovsky is putting his own particular slant on the archetype.

As ever, Tchaikovsky brings something inventive to the familiar, making it feel fresh whilst following familiar beats, and it must be said that some of it works well. However, there a few things that don’t.

Throughout the story Tchaikovsky repeatedly reaches for unexpected turns of phrase. Individually, they are not problematic, but collectively they disrupt the narrative and there were many times I had to read sentences repeatedly to fully understand what they were describing. It was akin to listening to a familiar tune that is on the whole, pleasing to the ear, only for the occasional unexpected note or discordant chord to momentarily pull you out of the music. The melody continues, but the spell has already been broken.

And this issue extends further than the family to the main characters Elena and Ross  who seem to never quite escape being functional protagonists. They move the story forward effectively enough, but neither develops the depth or personality needed to make the reader feel emotionally invested in their fate. 

Preaching To The Choir has all the ingredients for an unsettling tale of family, inherited secrets and generational trauma. It’s as inventive as only Adrian Tchaikovsky can be, but for me, the prose and the characters repeatedly kept those ideas at arms length.