Wrath Month Reads: “Bury Your Gays” by Chuck Tingle

Chuck Tingle’s latest novel, Bury Your Gays, shows that Pride isn’t the only thing that fuels the LGBTQIA+ community — we’re also brimming with righteous wrath!

Reader Beware: There are spoilers for Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle below! 

Harold Brother’s Studios gives horror writer Misha two options: either turn the characters in his TV series straight or kill them off in a blaze of glory during the season finale. After he refuses, Misha finds himself being haunted by his own creations. Or rather, he’s haunted by Harold Brother’s Studio’s version of his creations. And they’re out for blood. Misha has to figure out how to turn the algorithm around on the studio before it’s too late. 

Bury Your Gays is Chuck Tingle’s second novel published with Tor Nightfire, and it is the perfect companion to his first, Camp Damascus. For a book named after a (terrible) trope, Tingle works magic subverting every industry expectation with this stunning sophomore release. 

From the first chapter to the last, Tingle takes us on a gory ride. This book has plenty of thrills and LOTS of blood (and also a scene with a sledgehammer in the woods that made my stomach churn — how dare you describe limbs in this way, Chuck!?), but it’s also full of something else — something it took me a few chapters to really put my finger on. 

As early as chapter two, I felt like I was reading a love letter written directly to me, an ever floundering queer creative. Tingle is so good at putting words to the truth of past experience as a creative force. I kid you not, I pulled the physical book to my lips and gave the page a little kiss when I read “Some events are timeless, I guess, stuck between past, present, and future. They’re a different color than the rest. A different scale. A different tense. When you turn them into a screenplay or a song or a novel or even a piece of erotic fanfiction, these are moments that will outlive your body.” 

Throughout the book, Chuck illustrates this point when we get to experience some of Misha’s past, each experience coinciding with the creation of one of Misha’s horror villains. Misha is talking to us as if he’s standing there beside us, watching each memory play out with us, while also showing us what it was like in his mind at the time. It’s a seamless blending of past and present. It was fresh and I couldn’t get enough of it. 

When Misha realizes that the studio is attempting to turn his real life story into a gay tragedy, he picks up a weapon and starts swinging, unwilling to let the studio turn his death into dollar signs. The unapologetic plunge into madness is a thing of beauty. 

This alone would have made this story my favorite read of the summer. But Tingle doesn’t stop there. Bury Your Gays is a multifaceted gem; the longer you look the more beautiful it is. 

What I love most about this story is that Misha’s support system never doubts him, even in the face of impossible monsters. Most suspense novels would use half of its pages on the main character trying to convince his loved ones that he is truly being haunted. But Misha’s boyfriend, Zeke, and his best friend, Tara, never miss a beat — from page one they’re fully on board.

Not only does this illustrate the Herculean lengths to which the queer community will go to for one another (even in the face of cosmic truth and spine-ripping violence,) but it gives us, the readers, a chance to focus on the real horrors the book presents us with: data theft, AI/CGI monstrosities, and corporate greed.

In addition to great gay, bi, and asexual aromantic rep, Bury Your Gays tackles pay disparity in Hollywood, the threat of studio-owned performances being turned into posthumous performances that may or may not have a consciousness, and corporate greed on an eldritch horror level. While we, in the real world, aren’t being chased around Los Angeles by AI creations made of nanotechnology yet, Tingle does a wonderful job of showing us exactly what we have to fear if the current AI boom isn’t taken down a peg (or six.) 

But despite this grim reality that likely isn’t as far off as it seems at first glance, Tingle never lets us forget one important fact: the queer community has both the power to uplift and dismantle. 

All in all, Bury Your Gays smashed my expectations. According to Tingle, this is his most personal work yet, and I felt that intimacy on every page. In Bury Your Gays we get to take a peek behind the pink mask and sunglasses, and what we see is terrifying. It is beautiful. It is timeless. 5/5 stars. 

Author: Ash Macaulay

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