Bury Your Gays

By Chuck Tingle

Published by: Tor Nightfire

Publication date: July 9, 2024

With his sophomore horror novel, Bury Your Gays, the follow-up to his smash mainstream debut Camp Damascus, Chuck Tingle has hit another home run.

Tingle has been an internet sensation for around a decade for self-publishing his weird, queer homoerotic stories with titles like Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt and Bisexually Banged By These Sentient Plastic Easter Eggs Who Eat Me Out From Both Sides While I’m In a Standing Position Which Is a Pretty Cool Move. In 2022, he made his mainstream debut with Camp Damascus, a horror novel about a gay conversion therapy camp. It blew my hair back when I read it. And I’m bald. So when I got the opportunity to review his latest work, Bury Your Gays, I was thrilled.

The novel tells the story of Misha, a jaded Hollywood scriptwriter who is at a high point in his career. A short film he made is nominated for an Oscar, and his TV show, Travelers, is a hit. But when Misha is about to out the two main characters of his show as gay, he’s told he has to kill them “for the algorithm”. Faced with a choice, Misha suddenly becomes stalked/haunted by characters he created, and he, his boyfriend, and his best friend are all in a lot of danger.

Bury Your Gays is gripping from the very first chapter. Tingle creates not only some genuinely scary moments, but a mystery readers will absolutely want to know the answer to. Along the way, he also weaves in Misha’s backstory, emotionally explaining why our protagonist lives his life semi-closeted, and why it means so much to him to out his characters and keep them alive. I do my reading at night, before I go to sleep, and I found myself having trouble putting the book down to be a responsible adult and get enough sleep. It’s been a bit since I read a book I was mad to put down to do other things. I just wanted to burn through it. I had to know what happened next.

The thing I loved the most about the writing in this novel is that Tingle manages to address so many societal issues in one tale so deftly. He addresses not only the way that Hollywood stories treat the LGBTQ+ community but AI, corporate greed, data privacy, creating art for “the algorithm”, and even the phenomenon of people having freakouts on airplanes. Seems like a lot when written out like that, but it never seems anything less than natural and part of the story. A truly remarkable feat.

Bury Your Gays is a shining example of horror holding a mirror up to society and showing the ugly parts. It’s tense, gripping, scary, emotional, and, in the end, triumphant. Definitely put this one on your summer reading list.