Preaching to the Choir (Terrible Worlds: Transformations) by Adrian Tchaikovsky Narrator: Emma Newman
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Libro.fm, supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, science fiction, science fiction horror
Series: Terrible Worlds: Transformations
Pages: 176
Length: 4 hours and 35 minutes
Published by Solaris, Tantor Media on August 11, 2026
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
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…
My Review:
We’ve seen this story before – or at least we think we have. Scion of wealthy English family decides to take his American girlfriend home to the moldering family pile for a reunion. He’s a bit embarrassed about the staid, fusty traditions his family insists on, but he either loves her enough to let her see where he came from – or is scared enough of his family to need backup to get through the ordeal.
Or, most likely, a bit of both.
The vast, sprawling mansion, complete with gargoyles watching over everything and seemingly everyone, may not be moldering, but it certainly is a stately family pile. Also an extremely eerie and downright gothic monstrosity – for, as it turns out, multiple definitions of both ‘gothic’ and ‘monstrosity’. Definitely complete with monsters.
Elena Mendes thought she understood what her boyfriend Ross Enderbough was getting her into. Ross thought he knew all the truths about his uber-rich and extremely influential family that he needed to know. They were both very, very wrong.
About pretty much everything they thought they knew. About the Enderboughs, about the family, about the evils that money and influence are capable of, and most of all, about the way the world really, really works.
They’re about to find out how little either of them really knew about, well, anything at all. Especially about each other.
Escape Rating A: I thought I knew what I was getting into with this one. Then again, Elena and Ross did too. We were ALL wrong. Really, really wrong. Very much like Elena, creepily, utterly captivated (for both senses of that word) but wrong. (I was particularly captivated by Emma Newman’s narration. I couldn’t turn my ears away, and I couldn’t let myself listen late at night because that way undoubtedly lay terrible nightmares and the story was nightmare enough in the full light of day!)
This turned out to be one of the tales as old as time. Not that one. The other one. The one about power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, forever and ever, amen. Not that any deities to which one could say an amen to get invoked in this story.
The creepy gothic atmosphere reminded me a LOT of Simon R. Green’s Ishmael Jones series – which very nearly led me down a much less gruesome primrose path than the one the actually got. Ross and Elena walk up to a creepy, gothic mansion, already on alert that something monstrous is hiding in the cellar, or up in the attic, or among the family secrets. Most likely, all of the above.
There’s certainly a sense early on that somewhere along the way the Enderboughs made a Faustian bargain with someone, and that the latest generation of the family has been ordered back to the family seat to pay their dues to whoever or whatever has granted the family their centuries – if not longer – of wealth and influence. Those twentysomethings, Ross and his cousins, are aware that most likely the family has a veritable army of skeletons hidden in the depths of the family closet, but they expect monsters of the human variety.
What they get is something far, far worse. And much, much harder to walk away from. Or even run.
For most of the story, in addition to being utterly creeped out, it read like the true horror version of Tanya Huff’s Direct Descendant. Both are stories where the ancestors have made monstrous bargains in return for future prosperity and expect each generation of their descendants to continue the deal. Direct Descendant, because it is COZY horror, as much of a contradiction in terms as that is, ends in a compromise. The deal is changed to eliminate the monstrosity of the thing – at least for present and future generations.
Preaching to the Choir, very much on the other hand, is NOT cozy. There is a compromise, but not the kind that changes the deal. At all. It just opens a window in the skeleton closet so that someone outside the family can climb IN – with eyes wide open.
In the end, as one of the characters reveals, this story is in dialogue with Ursula LeGuin’s classic, Hugo-Award winning short story, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. (And, by extension, Isabel J. Kim’s Nebula-Award winning response, Why Don’t We Just Kill the Kid in the Omelas Hole.
The original story wraps around the question of whether peace and prosperity are worth the truly heinous moral and ethical cost that one city is willing to pay to maintain them. And whether, and how, the people who walk away with the knowledge of that cost are just as guilty as the people who actually benefit. Kim’s later response throws the vast reach of social media into the mix, moving the question from being about “them” to being about “us”.
Which winds back around to Elena’s choices at the end of the story. Because she can choose to benefit from the heinous thing, or she can choose to walk away, knowing that no one will believe her if she ever tries to expose what really happened. But she can’t “unknow” what she knows, so she’ll always be part of the monstrosity, no matter what choice she makes for herself. She’ll always be complicit, even if she walks away. Which makes her choice obvious – and utterly chilling.
