What’s a queer screenwriter to do when his fictional monsters come for him?
I can’t say I’ve read any of Chuck Tingle’s prolific oeuvre of titles like Space Raptor Butt Invasion or Pounded in the Butt by My Handsome Sentient Library Card, but my first entry into the Tingleverse confirmed what the jacket copy and author biography offered: Tingle is a writer and person who leads with love.
Bury Your Gays, his sophomore queer horror novel from Tor Nightfire, is testament to the author’s compassionate ethos. Building on the success of Camp Damascus, his horror debut, which I purchased and blazed through immediately after finishing Bury Your Gays, Tingle’s second novel offers readers a harrowing glimpse of what it means to be queer in Hollywood. And every chilling beat in this story is stronger and more propulsive than the last.
Meet Misha Byrne. He’s basically a young, queer Wes Craven at the midpoint of an already trailblazing career in Tinseltown. He’s got a solid back catalog of films, and his “X-Files meets Doctor Who”-style TV show is headed for its biggest and baddest season finale yet. The only problem? The studio bigwigs aren’t exactly happy with the girl-on-girl romance he’s written into it. He’s promptly instructed by his bosses to “bury your gays,” wordplay that does double duty as an imperative to kill his queer characters and tone down just how inclusive the work is.
Naturally, Misha isn’t thrilled with this idea, but when the monsters central to his body of work come to life and start threatening his actual body, he’s forced to reconsider. Among these creatures? A ghostly smoker who asks victims for a light (and grinds their bones to dust if they refuse); a sex-working serial killer; a black sheep that transforms into an alien before eating its prey; and a shapeshifting Amazon who renders victims comatose with a touch of her finger.
It’s the spectral smoker who imposes a literal deadline on Misha: Either make the requested changes to the script or else have his bones ripped out and ground to ash in five short days.
Alrighty then.
Without spoiling too much of the outstanding, spine-Tingling plot, I’ll report that Misha’s do-or-die decision culminates in a spectacular finale I didn’t see coming. Bury Your Gays is, at its core, a novel about queer love and the kinship that binds a community of people. Tingle does an excellent job weaponizing truly scary horror-movie tropes and draws clear inspiration from films like “Hellraiser,” “The Ring,” and “The Witch,” while simultaneously making us love and root for Misha and his friends.
Bury Your Gays is also a cutting criticism of Hollywood, the financial factors that make certain art a success while other art is left to wither on the vine — even if it’s critically acclaimed — and the challenges faced by creative types when going up against a heteronormative, hegemonic culture of capitalism. My hope is that this commentary doesn’t hamstring Tingle’s burgeoning career as a horror writer because, if this book is any indication, he’s got the chops to put Misha — and real-life horror scribes — on notice.
Nick Havey is director of Institutional Research at the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, a thriller and mystery writer, and a lover of all fiction. His work has appeared in the Compulsive Reader, Lambda Literary, and a number of peer-reviewed journals.
