Bury Your Gays

Chuck Tingle is king of queer horror. He can be queen if he wants, I know he is non-dysphoric trans, but whatever kind non-authoritarian benevolent monarch title works, he is it. This novel Bury Your Gays and his other traditional published novel Camp Damascus are set in the same layer of the Tingleverse, and I should explain that if you don't know Chuck Tingle lore.

So, Tingleverse is a multi-layer reality, all infinite number of universes stacked on top of each other. The higher up a story is, the closer everything in the story is to our base reality. The lower, the stranger and more about butts and dicks and all that you see in his internet published short stories. But in all layers Love is Real. Outside the Tingleverse is the Void, which comes seeping in and brings monsters and horrors, and that is partially where the horrors in his horror novels come from. So, Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays take place in the same layer, but it is a little down from our top layer so more weirdness can happen. The novels reference each other in really tiny ways but you don't need one before the other.

I don't want to give too much information on the plot because there are some nice surprises and it is best to just experience them. But it has a lot to do with "capitalism is terrible" and "generative AI is terrible" and "hollywood is often terrible" and writing horror as a way of overcoming childhood trauma. Like, the monsters in the book come straight from the protagonist's childhood experiences with homophobia by friends and family, that he wrote into film and television. And there is the big theme that queer joy is not a forced thing and we should be able to write whatever queer stories we want to write rather than whatever is profitable for big media or The Algorithm.

The ending climax made me laugh and cheer and cover up my smile with my hand. It was that good.