Whisper House Press

No intentional spoilers, but reveals are implied—strong recommendation here that you skip this review and read Bury Your Gays immediately, without knowing anything about its plot.

Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays is 12% guts, 13% jokes, and all heart. Wait—it’s 40% gay Scream plus 60% The X Files homage. And remember that film Enemy of the State? Throw that in the mix for good measure. In a thriller-horror novel following Camp Damascus, a chiller rendering the terrors of conversion-therapy camps as obvious as they are awful, Tingle’s again relates queer struggles that are almost intentionally ignored in the straight world (to everyone’s detriment). In this followup, Tingle writes of Misha, a Hollywood figure wrestling with his public identity as an ambiguously gay show writer. While the story’s internal conflict is about whether or not Misha feels safe to be out in every area of his life, its external conflict is driven by the trope of popular media writing off queer characters or having them die in a blaze of straight-person-saving glory. Specifically in this case, Misha is commanded by the powers that be (who turn out to be quite powerful indeed) to do just that: to kill off his gay characters in the final episode of a successful TV show he’s written. He doesn’t want to do this, of course. Enter: conflict. Misha’s also in the running for an Oscar for a short film, which adds to some of the tension of the story and plays out with an intensity that had my eyes bulging and my kids wondering what was so shocking. (Truly, I read a lot of horror, and I read a lot, period, and the second half of this book had me almost racing to finish and to find out what’ll happen to a cast of characters of which I’d grown so fond.) They watch me read some 120 books a year and have never seen this look on my face before today. I can’t wait to buy them a copy of this book. So the story plays out, and there are forces at work that put our hero’s very life at risk—along with that of everyone who knows him or happens to be standing near him at any given time.

Bury Your Gays is a tremendous success. Hilarious, gross, and heart-warming; this mostly straight reader connected emotionally to what friends have described as a common experience of a queer person being excluded, vilified, or used as a prop for someone else exorcizing their own potential queerness. Horror often helps us to express our fears and traumas in ways that are more accessible than sharing therapy sessions with the public, and Chuck Tingle connects me to his characters on a genuine emotional level. The joking-but-serious tone here works, contributing to my love for the story.

I’ve got one more thing to add to this review, and it’s going to seem like a reach, but please, follow Professor Capone for just another moment.

When Socrates tells Glaucon in The Republic that he’s going to describe a city where Justice reigns, he does so in the context of describing what Justice is. Glaucon, his interlocutor, had claimed that we’re essentially backed into a corner and have to accept justice because we’re too weak to take what we want and get away with it. Socrates doesn’t cotton to this way of thinking. In defending his own view of Justice, he has to say what it is, but that’s tough—and maybe boring. So he tells a story. Justice will be easier to see if writ large, he explains—described by way of a thought experiment. He goes on to describe what Philosophy 101 students know as The Republic, which is often taught (wrongly) as “Plato’s ideal city-state.” If you figured me for comparing Chuck Tingle to Plato or the character Socrates, you’d be right. In Bury Your Gays, as in Camp Damascus, Tingle makes apparent through exaggeration and metaphor the stuff that wouldn’t grab our attention as clearly without figurative language and in the mode of literature. What people might ignore or instinctively battle in a political debate may be understood more clearly on an emotional level through storytelling. “Love is real,” as Tingle says in his afterword (and every time he speaks or writes, I think), and the message comes through in Bury Your Gays, loud and clear. Five goddamned stars.