Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps writing horror and letting other people call it science fiction. The Clarke Award winner has spent years building cosmic horror, body horror and folk horror into books the genre crowd files elsewhere, from the airless dread of Walking to Aldebaran to a whole shelf of standalones with real teeth.
His gothic horror novella Preaching to the Choir, the second Terrible Worlds: Transformations book, arrives from Solaris on 11 August. It drops eat-the-rich horror into a crumbling English monastery and a family that gathers once a generation. If you love horror and skipped Tchaikovsky, this is where you stop skipping.
Adrian Tchaikovsky keeps a soft spot for things with too many legs. Spiders, mostly. Insects. Aliens stitched together from the wrong number of limbs. He won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Children of Time. The heroes of that novel are a species of spiders, raised up to think and build. Since then he has spent every year proving he can write almost anything. Horror readers have mostly filed him under science fiction and walked on by. That was always a mistake. Next month it becomes an awkward one.
On 11 August in the US and 13 August in the UK, Solaris publishes Preaching to the Choir. It is a gothic horror novella. It is pointed straight at us.
So let me make the case.
He writes bodies that betray their owners. He writes minds that do not think like ours and do not care about us. He writes closed systems where the rules are cruel and the exit is hidden. Those are horror engines, and he has been running them for years, dressed up as science fiction.
Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Preaching to the Choir: Horror’s Best-Kept Name
Tchaikovsky writes a lot. There is the Shadows of the Apt series, ten books of insect-inspired war fantasy. There is Children of Time and its sequels, which took the Clarke and then a British Science Fiction Award for Children of Ruin. There is the Final Architecture space opera, the Tyrant Philosophers books, Dogs of War, Elder Race, Cage of Souls, Service Model, and a shelf of standalones that would take you a year to clear. He trained in zoology before he trained in law, and you can feel the biology in the work. His monsters are not lazy. They have anatomy.
He puts out three or four books a year, spread across half the genre map. Horror fans then assume none of it is for them. Too much space opera. Too many spaceships. Not enough teeth. I understand the instinct. I have made the same lazy call about plenty of writers. It does not hold with Tchaikovsky, and it never really has.
Take Walking to Aldebaran. It came out in 2019 as the first of his Terrible Worlds novellas, and it is one of the nastiest little books he has written. An astronaut called Gary Rendell gets lost inside a huge alien object. It drifts at the edge of the solar system. The crew named it the Frog God, going on the shape of it.
Gary ends up alone in the cold tunnels, talking to himself, eating what he finds, and slowly coming apart in body and in mind. It starts funny. It does not stay funny. By the end it is pure cosmic horror, the kind Lovecraft chased and rarely caught, and Tchaikovsky lands the twist like a punch to the gut.
That is the tell. The zoology is a big part of it. So is his interest in bodies, and in how they change. So is the pull towards the truly alien. All of it points at horror as clearly as it points at science fiction. A man who thinks this hard about what it means to have a body, and to lose control of one, was always going to write things that scare you.
Look at the rest of the shelf and the pattern holds. The Doors of Eden is a parallel-worlds romp with real monsters loose in it. Cage of Souls is a dying-earth novel, grotesque and strange, shortlisted for the Clarke in 2020. Spiderlight takes a cosy fantasy quest and lets something creepy-crawly and cruel crawl through the middle of it. None of these get shelved as horror. All of them have horror in the engine room. Tchaikovsky reaches for the unsettling the way other writers reach for a comma.
Here is the other reason horror readers should start now, and start with the novellas. The short form is where he is at his sharpest. He can build a nine-hundred-page world when he wants to. He can also strip a story down to a hundred and seventy pages with no fat on it at all. For a horror reader, that is the perfect way in. You do not need to sign up for an eight-book saga about wasp people. You need one afternoon and a strong stomach. It helps that he reads his own audiobooks, and reads them well, so you can let him narrate the nightmare to you directly.
Which brings us to Preaching to the Choir.
The setup is old English gothic done straight. Elena Mendes is dating Ross Enderbough, who is rich in the way that predates the United States. Ross gets summoned home to Enderby, the family pile, built centuries ago as a monastery. There is a family gathering that happens once a generation. Partners are not invited. Ross brings Elena anyway, for moral support, which is the sort of decision that never ends well in a book with a mouldering house on the cover. There are secrets in the old stone. There are things in the unkempt woods. And the phrase “old money” turns out to mean far more, and far worse, than Elena ever bargained for.
It is the second book in Tchaikovsky’s Terrible Worlds: Transformations line, after Saturation Point. Solaris are putting it out as a hardback, ebook and audiobook, with cover art by Gemma Sheldrake. The publisher is selling it to fans of Ready or Not and The Magnus Archives, and for once the comparison earns its keep. This is eat-the-rich horror with a folk horror shadow across it. A closed community. An ancient rite. A house that has been feeding on something for a very long time.
That angle matters right now. Horror and science fiction have been bleeding into each other for years, and the audience has caught up. Look at how folk horror clawed its way back into the mainstream. Look at the rich family with a terrible secret. It became a whole lane of its own, on the page and on screen. Ready or Not. Knives Out. A dozen followers after them. Tchaikovsky steps into that lane now. He brings an eye for the non-human and a taste for the short, cruel twist. He is the right writer at the right time. He is not chasing a trend. He got here on his own road.
He writes bodies that betray their owners. He writes minds that do not think like ours and do not care about us. He writes closed systems where the rules are cruel, and the exit is hidden. Those are horror engines. He has been running them for years, dressed up as science fiction, and a lot of the genre crowd never noticed.
So here is my pitch, plain. Say you love horror and you have never read Adrian Tchaikovsky. Then you have left one of the sharpest writers in British genre fiction on the table. Start with walking to Aldebaran while you wait. Then pre-order Preaching to the Choir and let the family at Enderby teach you what old money really costs.
Horror readers have spent years telling themselves Tchaikovsky is science fiction, not their department. Next month, in a monastery full of very rich people, that excuse finally runs out.
And to prove my point, here is an exclusive excerpt from Preaching to the Choir
Her bladder woke her some time much later, and needless to say nobody had thought about en suite bathrooms back in umpteen hundred and three when the house was built. It took some courage to part the curtains. Everything was completely silent, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a hunched, beak-nosed shape waiting out there to scare the bejesus out of her.
She tried to remember where the john had been. Somewhere down the hall and then round a corner. Barefoot, a blanket clutched about her, she tottered out to find it.
And she couldn’t, of course, and she padded back and forth and up and down, only thankful it was too dark for all those portraits of Enderbough ancestors to properly glower at her. Until she tried a door that she was absolutely sure was going to be Uncle Jas’s bedroom or something, and instead there was a somewhat rusty but tolerably modern bathroom, brass fittings and all, and she was able to relieve the internal pressure without making some dreadful faux pas that would further dis-endear her to Ross’s family.
And then she couldn’t find her way back. Too many turns around dark corridors, too many pictures and vases and occasional tables that all looked the same in the nocturnal gloom. And she pattered about on increasingly chilly bare feet, snagging the blanket on things and wondering how this already big house had grown to around the size of a city block.
She came to a balustraded balcony at the head of a flight of stairs, and she almost cried because it wasn’t even the stairs she and Ross had come up. Down there was an entirely different entrance hall, a bigger one, with a stone floor spread with rugs. It was enough to make her think she’d gone back in time or something, like in those kids’ books she used to read.
She was about to do something—run off or beat her fists on the nearest door or shout for a butler or burst into tears—when there was movement from below. And then she was about to run down the stairs and gabble to whoever it was about being lost and where the hell was Uncle Henry’s fucking room when you needed it. And then she didn’t, because there were four people below, and they were wheeling some sort of large trolley between them.
All normal so far, sure. Staff doing staff stuff, ready for the new day. Except they weren’t staff. She saw Gil Enderbough there, and there were two other men and a woman. They all wore coats over what looked like nightwear, if she was any judge. They all had grim, flat expressions. And on the trolley—the gurney, she now realised—was a body.
Or she didn’t know that, but the lights were on down there, and she could see quite clearly. It had a sheet over it, but she was studying medicine at Johns Hopkins and she knew what a body under a sheet looked like. Unless Ross’s family were prone to med student-style pranks, that was what they had. And not a fun body.
Not even the simplicity of ‘Great Uncle Mordicai’s old heart troubles finally got the better of him.’ The shape beneath the sheet was twisted at a painful angle, as though their last throes had almost snapped their back, and there was something dreadfully wrong about the way the sheet hung over the chest. The way it was pushed up by some angular shape, like splayed fingers.
Gil opened the big double doors, and freezing, fog-damp air rushed into the house like clammy Vikings. Some part of her expected the lights to gutter, except of course electricity didn’t do that. Up at the top of the stairs, shrouded in darkness, she just watched as the four of them manhandled the trolley outside and shut the door behind them.
The sole woman looked back, just before it closed. Looked almost into Elena’s eyes, if only she could have pierced the shadows. And Elena recognised her with a shock. Someone Ross had mentioned, one of the few times he’d been positive about his family. Someone Elena could have guessed would be here if she’d only thought. Someone she’d always wanted Ross to introduce her to.
Right now, seeing the woman go off with her fellow body-snatchers, Elena wasn’t sure she wanted to meet her any more.
And then she turned and found Uncle Jas standing right there. Somehow silent and utterly unremarked in the shadows, despite the bulk of him. Seeing her. Seeing her see what she had seen.
No anger on his face, barely any expression at all. That was, perhaps, the most frightening thing about him.
“You appear to be lost,” he said, the very tonelessness of his voice imbuing the utterance with multiple meanings. “Why don’t I show you back to Henry’s room?”
Preaching to the Choir by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Out in hardback, eBook and audiobook: 11 August 2026 US, 13 August 2026 UK
A chilling novella from the “Master of British SF” for fans of Ready or Not and The Magnus Archives.
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…
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British science-fiction and fantasy writer known for a wide variety of work, including the Children of Time, Final Architecture, Dogs of War, Tyrant Philosophers and Shadows of the Apt series, as well as standalone books such as Elder Race, Doors of Eden, Spiderlight and many others. Children of Time and its series has won the Arthur C Clarke and BSFA awards, and his other works have won the British Fantasy, British Science Fiction and Sidewise Awards.
Ginger Nuts of Horror: The Heart and Soul of Horror Reviews
Looking to get your horror book or film in front of the genre’s most dedicated audience? Ginger Nuts of Horror is one of Europe’s largest independent horror review websites, with over 30 contributors publishing horror book reviews and horror movie reviews almost every single day.
We offer far more than reviews. Authors, filmmakers and publishers can promote their work through in-depth horror book reviews, horror film reviews, comic and video game coverage, news features, and our popular author and director interviews like Five Minutes With. Our guest feature series, The Horror of My Life, Childhood Fears, The ? That Made Me and more, let creators tell their story while promoting their latest release.
Every feature is built to sell your work. We include backlinks to your website or Amazon author page, a full synopsis, and a universal purchasing link that sends readers straight to their local store. Add a large, engaged social following and an 18-year archive of trusted horror coverage, and you have a platform genuinely built to grow your readership.
Whether you’re an established author, an indie filmmaker, or a debut voice in indie horror, there’s a way for us to help you reach more fans. Explore our horror book reviews and horror movie reviews, then get your horror book or film featured today.
