I received an advance listening copy of this book thanks to the publisher and Libro.fm. All opinions are my own.
Picking up a horror story to read is very much not a usual thing for me. I’m a fraidy-cat with an overactive imagination and I don’t enjoy feeling scared. But Adrian Tchaikovsky is a popular author that I’ve seen on the shelves at the bookstore quite frequently and a novella seemed like a pretty safe way to test his writing out. As well, all of my audiobook time occurs in the daylight and that felt a bit safer. The audio version of this novella is only about 5 hours so it also didn’t feel like a huge output of my time.
Elena Mendes is travelling with her boyfriend, Ross Enderbough, to his ancestral family home in England. Both medical students at Johns Hopkins University, Elena knows that Ross comes from wealth but she hasn’t realized quite what that means until they arrive at the sprawling, secretive family property known as Enderby. The Enderbough family has gathered for an unknown reason, some event that happens only every 30 years or so, something the younger generation – all in their early 20s – has never before experienced. Outsiders, including spouses, are not invited, and Elena’s presence is immediately unwelcome. But Ross insists that he wants her there and on her first night Elena sees something that means she’s no longer allowed to leave.
Even as a non-horror reader, there weren’t a ton of surprises to this story. We kind of know where this is going. Ancient, rich, and powerful, the Enderbough family has made certain choices to get that way and there are sacrifices that they are willing to make. Now it’s time to bring the next generation into the fold. Elena, Ross, and his cousins don’t yet know what that means but they’ll quickly find out.
What I did like was that Elena, while the outsider, isn’t totally alone. It doesn’t immediately become her agains the Enderboughs because Ross is equally confused and then horrified. Two of his cousins are also quickly becoming concerned about what the family secret is and the four of them team up to try and escape. One of the cousins also witnesses something horrifying and so there is never a part of the story where Elena is trying to convince others to believe her. I feel like that’s a common trope in thrillers and I was glad that Elena almost immediately had people on her side.
At the same time, Ross wasn’t on her side in the way that I would have expected a romantic partner to be. All of their interactions felt very platonic and I couldn’t tell at all how long they’d been dating or how serious their relationship was. Serious enough, clearly, for him to bring her along, but not serious enough for him to ever hold her hand or put an arm around her when she’s upset? This disconnect between them made the stakes for Elena feel too low. It seemed like it would be very easy for her to lift Ross right out of her life because I didn’t believe they had any emotional attachment to each other. If they had been married or thinking about having a child together, I feel that there would have been more of a sense for Elena to care about the next generation of Enderboughs and it would have added more tension to her decisions.
As well, I’m not sure why Tchaikovsky who, from what I can tell online, is a white, British man, chose a Latina from Oregon to be his protagonist. While it does create an obvious difference between Ross and Elena’s backgrounds, it never quite felt believable. The story is narrated in third person but we follow Elena quite closely. Added to that, her dialogue sometimes felt overly British. For example, she refers to Enderby more than once as “the family pile”, an expression I had never heard before and Google tells me is a British expression.
I did enjoy Preaching to the Choir. It had tension all throughout and wasn’t too scary for me. I don’t know that I’ll read more by Tchaikovsky but I can see why readers enjoy him.
