8.5

Bury Your Gays Cements Chuck Tingle’s Place as a Vital Voice in Horror

By Matthew Jackson  |  July 12, 2024 | 10:00am
Books Reviews Chuck Tingle
Bury Your Gays Cements Chuck Tingle’s Place as a Vital Voice in Horror

Chuck Tingle writes horror with an unassuming, natural warmth. That might sound contradictory, but Tingle, who’s cultivated a massive online following through both his writing and his persona, is a deft practitioner of one of the genre’s oldest tricks: Give us characters we care about, then put them in danger. It’s a simple tactic for horror writing, but Tingle’s great gift is to take it deeper, to immerse us not just in the lives of these characters, but in their hopes and dreams and the way they intersect with whatever horrific thing has suddenly emerged in their lives.

In other words, there is love in these pages, and that love makes the horror not just more powerful, but more real. 

Bury Your Gays, Tingle’s latest horror novel following the success of Camp Damascus last year, begins in a place we tend to associate with deep cynicism: The Hollywood studio machine. But for all his time working in the story mines as a screenwriter, Misha Byrne is not yet fully gripped by that pessimism even in a world where artificial intelligence is taking over swaths of his industry and executives are constantly demanding changes. Misha is fresh off an Oscar nomination for a short film he made, he has a hit streaming series, and he’s got a boyfriend he loves. Plus, he’s a human writer in an increasingly artificial game, and he seems to have some degree of influence.

That is, at least, until an executive he thought was an ally gives him an unfortunate demand: Kill off the two gay leads on his streaming series right as their romance is coming into focus. It is, the executive assures Misha, the right thing for the show, the popular thing for the show, but Misha, who spent his childhood longing for the kind of romance he’s now writing, refuses to bury his gays, and hopes a potential Oscar win could add to his influence and pull enough that he won’t have to. 

Before that can happen, though, a series of encounters shakes up Misha’s life. It seems that his own creations—monsters from the horror movies that made his name and reputation—are stalking him, and signs point to them being something more than just demented fans in cosplay. If Misha’s going to survive his own life, let alone Hollywood, he has to get to the heart of what’s really happening and face both his past and his future simultaneously. 

Tingle’s narrative unfolds through several devices, from flashbacks of Misha’s childhood to screenplay excerpts of his current life his own propulsive, witty, first-person narration, all focused on showing us a man in conflict with his own past, his own identity, and of course his future as a creator. The horror seems to come from outside Misha, of course, but Tingle is adept at showing us just how rooted that horror is in certain fears Misha himself has been reluctant to face, from his queer identity and how it might impact his hometown to his personal attachments within the industry and, of course, his determination to give his characters what he feels they deserve. His voice is the core of this story, and it’s both strong and vulnerable, imbuing Bury Your Gays with the kind of warmth we’ve come to associate with a Chuck Tingle story. 

But none of that will save you when the horror elements come, and when they emerge, they do so unforgettably. While there are clear genre inspirations at work in the background—everything from The X-Files to The Ring—what stands out in Bury Your Gays are the monsters that seem to have emerged whole cloth from Tingle’s imagination. He’s great at warm, human moments, yes, but he’s arguably even better at making monsters and unleashing them on characters we genuinely fear for, and here, with everything from a strange black lamb to an absolutely terrifying figure known as The Smoker, he gives us some of the scariest scenes I’ve encountered in a horror novel this year so far. 

All of this, combined with some frightening ruminations on AI and on what happens when a creator is in conflict with his own creations (both literally and figuratively) solidifies Bury Your Gays as another triumph for Chuck Tingle. It’s scary, it’s funny, it’s crackling with vibrant humanity, and it’s the kind of book that will keep you up late into the night, searching for monsters in every shadow. In other words, it’s the perfect summer horror novel, so don’t miss it.

Bury Your Gays is available now wherever books are sold. 

Matthew Jackson is a pop culture writer and nerd-for-hire who’s been writing about entertainment for more than a decade. His writing about movies, TV, comics, and more regularly appears at SYFY WIRE, Looper, Mental Floss, Decider, BookPage, and other outlets. He lives in Austin, Texas, and when he’s not writing he’s usually counting the days until Christmas.

 
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