Chuck Tingle is excellently ( and infamously ) known forself - publishing absurdist eroticathat almost always skews pouf . Despite ridiculous titles like Handsome Sentient Food Pounds My Butt And Turns Me Gay : Eight Tales Of Hot Food and Not Pounded By Bi Erasure Because My Current Hetero - Presenting Relationship Does Not Invalidate My Queerness , Tingle’swork remainssteadfastly earnest , which continues with his new - write horror narrative . Camp Damascusis Tingle ’s first full - length , traditionally bring out novel , and it expands on the tongue - in - nerve radical of queerness and selection he first write about with 2021’sStraight .
Up in the mountains and nest in the pastoral forests of Montana , Camp Damascus , the evangelical changeover camp , looms over the townspeople of Neverton . Rose Darling , a young woman who is just mistreat into self - consciousness and womanhood , has never been to Camp Damascus , but she know people who ’ve pass time there . She pick out face from her church service radical in the cheerful ads that play on the television . But nobody , not even her friends , seem to desire to talk about what happens at Camp Damascus .
What Tingle does throughout this book is set up expectations and then within the very same chapter ( sometimes on the same pageboy ) , rips them to shreds , leaving the bodies bloody and gasping in the wreckage . Camp Damascus is a sometimes - violent , often - vibrate book that plunges its entire limb into the open dresser cavities of Christian church - bless corpses , searching around for hearts and squeezing . Within the recognizable trauma of spiritual expected value , inherited rejection , and meeting someone at the wrong time , there is an underlying supernatural foreignness that feels right at home within Tingle ’s absurdist esthesia . He never pushes the envelope of either repulsion or queerness too much , but the assumption and execution are tight - paced , inventive , and redolent .
Image:Tor Nightfire
As Rose endeavor to figure out why she ’s suddenly coughing up mayflies , her father tells her that she ’s never had a bedroom doorway , her female parent continues to fiddle judgmental evangelical - themed redemption games as they walk through neighborhoods , and the church - nominate healer does n’t seem to know much at all . Through the first act , the Darling family merchandise Holy Scripture for view as Rose is haunt by a demon who only seems to seem when she has impure cerebration – when she thinks about a girl ’s jape or spends a little too recollective staring at the passably unknown sitting on the field . When she actualise that some of her memories are missing , she breaks into Dr. Smith ’s phonograph recording and finds her name on the list of kids who go to Camp Damascus , Rose becomes taken up with finding the true statement .
Rose is an incredibly compelling teller who surrounds herself with detect family and freedom combatant . She is designedly written as autistic in a way that feel straightaway recognisable and understandable , even for family line who are not on the spectrum . Her invariant refrains , her curiosity , her obsessions , all of these little hallmarks of her personality make her very likable . She is , however , a relatively square supporter . While she is draw along by the plot ( mainly drive by homophobic persecution , gaslighting , and literal embodiments of iniquity ) , there is very little gray orbit to her report . She is an ill-treated , queer autistic girl , and there is not much done to complicate her good cat status .
quiver is incredibly precise when depicting real - world repulsion ; the role of religion as a cudgel for respect , the emotional manipulation of a menage who does not want you to be queer , the conflict to settle the true statement of yourself with the image that people have of you . These tantrum resonate in a referee , dextrously sprain the mundane horrific , and weaken the position quo that everyone around Rose seems to strive for . It is a fantastic sabotage , and allows us to full substantiate Rose ’s decisions to switch , even when there ’s a price .
Image:Tor Nightfire
While there are many moments that finger designed to pull at your heartstrings — peculiarly if you ’re peculiar and have lived experience that ordinate with the variety of religious abuse and familial gaslighting that this Good Book depicts — there is an underlying control to Camp Damascus . It ’s cagy and terrifying , but with Tingle ’s earnest dedication to well-chosen endings , even if there ’s a price , Camp Damascus is a very scant sort of horror that refuses to let the bad guys bring home the bacon in any substantial mental ability . The repugnance and painfulness exist here , but neither push the edge of queer horror . It also lack the spry and frenetic mania of Tingle ’s Straight , a novelette that was very much without the form of reluctance that traditional publication might have inflict on Camp Damascus . The book is meek and its teeth filed down , if it had any to commence with .
The earnestness , almost saccharine in its ending , is also Camp Damascus ’ greatest strength . Tingle has crafted a ledger that is loose to bask because it ’s direct , undivided - minded , and deep reflects the funny experience of its writer and main character . It is neat and goodly , and not at all what I expect from Tingle . While there is some muss , I greatly enjoyed the whole Holy Scripture and would happily recommend the novel .
Camp Damascus exemplifies a revulsion history with an uncomplicated moral orbit , make it easy to down , and a clear filename extension of the positiveness and wonder that Tingle himself radiates online . While Camp Damascus drop off some of the Wyrd in the operation , it is a delightfully tingly book : just scary enough to be horror , but not so stomach - churning that it would turn people off the written material . Turning citizenry on is , in fact , what its source does best .
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle is usable for leverage now atMacmillanandAmazon .
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