This review is based on an eARC (Advance Reading Copy) provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Preaching to the Choir was released on August 11, 2026.

I first read Adrian Tchaikovsky six or seven years ago, and he quickly became one of my favorite authors. But I soon realized that he returns often to similar themes in his staggeringly prolific output, and I tend to have a better experience when I space out my reads. And so, not having read a Tchaikovsky book in just over a year, I come to Preaching to the Choir, a horror novella in which the American girlfriend of a British aristocrat visits his ancestral home for a rite whose terrors neither of them could have comprehended.  

The setup here is familiar, even as someone who doesn’t read a ton of horror. It calls to mind something like Get Out, though Preaching to the Choir focuses on class rather than race, and the lead’s boyfriend is himself in the dark about the place he’s leading her. That familiarity presents a challenge to keeping the reader invested even when they have a good idea of what’s going to happen, and it’s handled here by developing the characters’ genre-awareness fairly quickly. The isolated mansion that’s only barely accessible by car doesn’t get the hackles up too far, but it doesn’t take long from there. Between the family’s horror at seeing an unexpected guest and an ominous scene glimpsed in the dark, the lead’s unease ramps up quickly. The exact details of the horrors are held back until much later, but the characters realize that lives are at stake and escape is a necessity far before the details come clear. 

The quick development of the characters’ awareness may rob the story of a little bit of the creeping dread, but the uncanniness of the setting and the life-and-death stakes of their plight create plenty of drama to sustain the momentum of the narrative. There’s also a whole lot of commentary on the lengths that wealthy families will go to in order to preserve their power and influence. It’s the sort of commentary you’d expect from Tchaikovsky, but it folds into the horror wonderfully, feeling like a natural part of the story and not like a series of preachy asides. 

The questions about the exact shape of the evil give the reader something to wonder about, even if they may have pretty confident predictions about how the story will go, and there are a handful of illustrations representing artwork within the estate that add another pinch of uncanniness to the whole enterprise. But Preaching to the Choir isn’t just about the dramatic march to the inevitable conclusion. Instead, it just does enough to wrongfoot the reader and elevate it above a well-written-but-generic horror tale into something that lands some real punches at the conclusion. 

This is the fourth Tchaikovsky novella I’ve read under the Terrible Worlds series of standalones—admittedly less than half of the ones he’s written—and while Preaching to the Choir doesn’t quite hit the heights of the tremendous Ogres, it’s far closer to the top of the stack than it is to the bottom. It’s tense, it explores the themes with aplomb, and it has just enough of the unexpected to keep the reader from seeing everything coming. In a summer that hasn’t been full of jaw-dropping reads, this bucks the trend in heart-pounding fashion. 

Recommended if you like: horror, Tchaikovsky.

Can I use it for Bingo? It’s Published in 2026.

Overall rating: 17 of Tar Vol’s 20. Five stars on Goodreads.