Chuck Tingle - Reviews

Bury Your Gays

Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Horror/Sci-Fi
Themes: Artificial Intelligence, Cross-Genre, Diversity, Stardom
****

Description

Growing up, Misha never could've imagined he'd find success as a Hollywood screenwriter, but now - with a rising career penning horror movies and TV shows and an Oscar nomination for a live-action short - his dreams are coming true... almost. Deep down, he's still the scared boy who can't even come out of the closet to his family, though he's been dating Zeke for over a year and his works are heavily queer-coded. At its heart, though, the film industry still clings to traditional ideas, particularly the notion that openly gay characters don't get happy endings... thus, his latest argument with his agent over his hit supernatural show Travelers, when he's ordered to either closet the lead detective duo or kill them off in the season finale. Misha has invested too much of himself in the storyline to betray the characters (and the audience) like that; it's too much like betraying himself and the boy he used to be, who longed to see people like himself on TV. Thus, he fails to heed his agent's warnings about the consequences of defying the studio board - and that is when things start going very, very wrong for him, as monsters out of his own works begin stalking him.
Is it an elaborate hoax or particularly committed stalker? Is his mind cracking? Or is he up against something far more dangerous and powerful than he can imagine?

Review

The entertainment industry can be downright brutal, moreso for those who lie outside the norms and push the wrong envelopes in the wrong (read: likely to lose money) way. As shareholders and algorithms gain power over more and more aspects of creativity and output, it becomes even more brutal, to the point where original ideas and outlier voices are nearly eliminated (see also: why everything seems to be a remake or reboot or lightly-redressed version of the same stuff). Even when Hollywood appears to make progress on issues like LGBTQIA+ representation, that progress is often little more than window dressing, and all too often the maxim of "bury your gays" - eliminating non-straight characters, not allowing them to lead or have happy endings - seems to hold true. Here, Tingle presents one half-closeted creator who dares stand up for himself and his artistic freedom, only to find out the hard way how little the system (and the studio's bottom line) tolerates defiance by the people it sees as mere profit-generating property.
From the start, there's an ominous air as Misha drives into the Harold Brothers studio lot for his meeting with his agent. On the one hand, he seems to be living the dream of countless would-be creators who come to Los Angeles in general and the dream of the boy he used to be in particular, the one who grew up watching Harold Brothers cartoons and popular TV shows and started telling stories to himself to get through the hardest times of his life. On the other, the feeling of something off-kilter, something even predatory, sets in early, even before he gets the news from his agent that he's being ordered to ax the queer love story he's been slowly laying the groundwork for in his TV series that's meant to come out in the open with the season finale, and if he won't ax the story, he has to ax the characters living it. He grew up watching Hollywood tease audiences with "queer-baiting" only to weasel out of their own plot developments and clear story beats, betrayals that left a very bitter taste in the mouth of a boy who was still figuring out his sexuality but knew on an instinctive level that a punch had been deliberately pulled - or, rather, the punch had been redirected into his face, and the faces of a good chunk of the viewing audience, by studios that consider queer viewers lucrative enough to string along but not lucrative enough to openly validate or embrace. Most of the horror stories Misha pens, the ones that built his career, have roots in his past, and seeing them come to life on screens big and small has been a triumph, but an incomplete one if he's not allowed to follow through on the stories that are most important to him, such as the relationship at the heart of his popular TV show. He knows defiance will have a cost, even for a current studio darling (his Oscar nomination makes him a temporary golden boy), but is too furious to consider how steep that cost might be... and even then, he can't begin to imagine the collateral damage to his friends and even total strangers who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, as his own monsters appear to be coming to life around him.
Even as Misha finds himself literally fighting a system that wants to erase, or defang and minimize, certain ideas and content, he also must confront an industry that seems intent on erasing humans from the creative equation altogether; in the first scene, as he enters the studio lot, he watches a big poster going up advertising a blockbuster movie starring an actor who died three years ago - an actor whose performance was created entirely from CGI and AI via a secret proprietary process, and the first such performance to earn an Oscar nomination. The fact that the actor in question would never have played a villain role when alive only makes it that much more of a betrayal to the spirit of the late artist, a dismissal of humanity in favor of marketing and dollar signs... one that audiences and academy voters seem all too willing to validate. The decision to kill the core storyline on Misha's show is also spurred by the number-crunchers on the nebulous board of directors behind the studio, based on algorithms and projected demographic appeals and other data points and analytics and other ways to maximize shareholder returns while minimizing actual creativity and humanity. By refusal to comply, Misha becomes a threat to the bottom line, and soon learns that even a proven track record of popularity and profitability is no shield from a board that smells a chance at even more profit (and hardly wants to encourage defiance in any of its property - Misha and the rest of the creators and actors and other employees being mere objects of little more consequence than office chairs or potted plants). Facing a rising tide of horror that threatens his safety and his sanity, he must dig deep into his own convictions and his own reasons for creating art in the first place, as well as learn to trust his friends; just as movies take a team to create, Misha will need a team if he is to survive the horror movie that his life quickly becomes.
Things move fairly well, and even the few lulls are filled with tension and backstory to fill things out. There are several twists and (often dark) turns, and some real pain revealed in both the here-and-now events and Misha's backstory, the events that led to him using horror as a medium to explore and process traumas. His friends sometimes feel a little flat and convenient, but ultimately form a decently solid team, though Misha must ultimately be the one to drive things forward, even through his failures. Along the way, Tingle plays with horror tropes, sometimes turning them on their ear and sometimes having Misha's attempts to outsmart them falling apart as he underestimates the forces set against him. It ends on a solid and satisfactory note.

Camp Damascus

Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
Themes: Cross-Genre, Demons, Diversity, Institutions, Religious Themes
****

Description

Like many people in Neverton, Montana, Rose Darling is a proud, God-fearing disciple of the Kingdom of the Pine church, a once-humble sect that has risen to great renown through its outreach programs and megachurch. Like many of her peers, she has even helped fundraise for their special summer camp, Camp Damascus, a place where misguided youth are led, through the glory and the fear of Christ, to reject foul secular temptations and unnatural lusts and learn to "love right". Their notoriously high success rate has concerned Godly parents from around the world sending their kids and teens to the secluded campground, but just what happens there is never made clear; even those who have been there don't seem to have much to say about it. But asking questions implies an unhealthy curiosity, which is little more than a lack of faith. For all the many questions that Rose has about the world, even she would never think to ask about the miracles performed at Camp Damascus, not when those miracles save so many wayward souls.
The day she sees the stranger at the swimming hole - a ghastly, pale figure that nobody else seems to see - is the day everything changes... especially when, just after her best friend Isaiah tries to kiss her, Rose finds herself coughing up flies onto the family dinner table.
Rose has been having odd feelings for a while, fragments of memories that don't seem to fit with her orderly life and uncomfortable emotions around certain girls in her high school, but she tries to ignore them. Now, as more unexplained and terrifying things start happening around her, she slowly realizes that it's not just part of growing up, or all in her head, or ordinary temptations that plague the faithful. Something far darker and more dangerous is going on in Neverton, and all threads lead to the secrets hidden at Camp Damascus.

Review

I first heard of Chuck Tingle a while ago, but the books he wrote didn't seem like my kind of thing. More recently, he seems to be moving into territory I find more interesting, so I figured this one was worth a shot when I found it available via Libby. Given my middling-to-low expectations going in, I found it surprisingly enjoyable, a dark tale of twisted faith and warped religion and the evil wrought by zealots thinking to forge love and God in their own images.
The sense of foreboding starts early on, as Rose struggles to fit in with her peers at the swimming hole and experiences her first vision of the pale, inhuman stranger in the woods. On the autism spectrum, her difficulty connecting to others is exacerbated by her fundamentalist upbringing; even in a churchgoing town, the children of the Kingdom of the Pines worshipers are a breed apart, complicit in their own isolation by a sense of unspoken moral superiority (though they themselves don't see it that way, just that other kids should embrace the love of Christ and reject corrupting secular influences). For Rose, scripture and the church also help ground her when she finds life or other teens confounding. When she later completely misreads her friend Isaiah's social cues, the reader already has a sense that it's more than just social awkwardness, given her visceral reaction to classmate Martina... but it's shortly thereafter, when she first coughs up a living fly, that both Rose and the reader realize just how terrifying the secrets beneath Neverton truly are - and the unusual reactions of her loving parents further show just how few people the young woman can trust to figure things out.
All along the way, she's told by her community and mentors and her own family to stop investigating, stop poking, stop indulging the sin of curiosity and obsession, but it's not in Rose's nature to let a question go, and once she starts picking at threads she has to follow where they lead, even if that direction runs counter to everything she's been taught to embrace. In the process, she learns just how her beliefs have been turned into blinders, how blind faith can be twisted by those with ulterior motives, and how much of what she was taught runs counter to the truth, even the truth within the very Bible she has essentially memorized. Does that mean her entire faith was misplaced? Not necessarily; she finds that the matter of belief, just like the matter of love, is far more complex and nuanced than she was raised to understand. She finds scant few allies and many enemies, and sometimes stumbles or backslides in her pursuit, but never gives up, especially not once the shape and scope of the evil before her becomes more evident, how many others have been hurt.
There are times when Tingle feels like he's hitting nails a little hard on their heads as he drives in certain points, but the palpable rage underneath the story is entirely justified... and all the more terrifying as one sees parallels in action in the real world, some of them being promoted to the national stage. Other parts seem to revel in gruesome imagery. On the whole, it's a solidly chilling story.