Oh, it’s a shudderer, this one.

Be warned – if you’re not into body horror, if you’re at all claustrophobic, or if you like your Torchwood lighter and funnier, The Hollow Choir is not one to put on your Must-Buy list.

But the chances are fairly high that if you’re still a fan of audio Torchwood from Big Finish in 2024, you like a bit of everything that can possibly come under the Torchwood banner, because over the years, the range has touched on all the points of the emotional compass. 

The Hollow Choir? Creepy, musical, dark, and never quite as silent as it should be, setting your nerves a-jangling and your teeth firmly on edge.

Kai Owen is back as Rhys Williams, and whereas in some other recent Torchwood releases, such as Poppet by Lauren Mooney and Stewart Pringle, Rhys away from Gwen has been gung-ho but clueless, here, he’s much more the driven family man, determined to essentially save Gwen from her own impulses by investigating a thing before she has a chance to trip any traps. She’s more valuable to their daughter, he decides, and so he takes it upon himself to stride into danger almost on her behalf. It’s Rhys not exactly as White Knight (Gwen would never stand for that), but Rhys as Valleys Husband. Valleys Dad. In fact, it’s Peak Rhys.

That’s a deeper, more grounded Rhys than you might be used to, but it’s actually just as well, because someone needs to keep their head in the course of this story, while everyone else is losing theirs as they descend into a Welsh cave system notorious for its “hollow choir” of singing voices – and the horrifying things that happen to those who hear it.

The premise begins relatively simply – three students have gone into the caves without filing the right details, and they haven’t been heard from in days. William (Simon Armstrong), a local man and highly experienced caver, is leading a team into the “underworld” to find them, when Rhys Williams, flashing some “special forces” credentials, joins his expedition. And Rhys, it seems, has advanced knowledge of the caves’ history – a map drawn by a mad woman who hid in the caves during the war, and who later (brace yourselves) stuck knitting needles in her ears, driven insane by the voices she continued to hear, and their constant invitations to come and join the hollow choir.

The stakes are raised for William en route into the cave system when it becomes apparent that the three students include someone for whom he cares a great deal, and to whom, in his mind, he owes a great debt. That leads to plenty of gruff Welsh working man bonding between William and Rhys, Armstong and Owen playing the forward-facing, understood emotion of such men straight as a die, helping the listener understand the kind of men they are – not exactly repressed, but much more comfortable with the practical world, its problems and solutions, than they ever would be in a murky emotional swamp of verbal expression.

The body horror is high in this story, though fortunately, it’s more described and implied than it is acted out. If you’re a fan of film series like Saw and Hellraiser though, you’ll be well-fed with this story – the sequence of impossible choices, unimaginable pain, but extremely expensive survival in the story will resonate with you.

And there’s some solid psychological fear here too – not only are the two men trapped underground in a claustrophobic cave system in the pitch dark (leading to the occasional concussion), but the constant low singing where no singing should be is enough to drive a saw across your synapses, especially over a prolonged period.

When we finally find out what the singing is in aid of, and the genuinely, utterly horrifying nature of the choir, there are ghastly human parallels to deal with and not everyone is getting out of the cave system alive. The ending is both sad and satisfying, with Rhys discovering his Inner Lethbridge-Stewart in terms of the solution he delivers to the siren song that has called out to its victims for centuries. 

The Hollow Choir is both a mood and a trip, and if you’ll take our recommendation, you won’t try and do too much else while you listen to it – it’s one of those stories where the soundscape is important to the whole experience, and you need to be keyed into it to get the most from the experience. The most creepy, shuddery, random icy hand down the spine-style terror, that is. Dedicate an hour of your life to The Hollow Choir and nothing but The Hollow Choir and you’ll have an experience which is both visceral and horrifying, which makes it perfect audio fodder for the colder, darker, drippier months of the year. A belter of a first Big Finish audio from a married couple who thoroughly understood the assignment, this is one that will make you glad you can disengage from it when it’s done, and return to life and light and happy, twinkly, shiny bright things…

Always assuming of course that The Hollow Choir will let you go… Tony Fyler

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