Book 1 of 30 for 2025! I’m off to a great start with a great book.

Back in 2023 I read Chuck Tingle’s debut horror novel Camp Damascus and absolutely loved it. Tingle followed up not long after with Bury Your Gays, another horror novel focusing in particular on “queer horror.”

Don’t let the subgenre of “queer horror” lull you into thinking that this is somehow too specialized for general readers of horror — it is a horror novel through and through, and an astoundingly clever one with a lot of imaginative ideas!

Misha Byrne has been a screenwriter in Hollywood for years, and has fought his way to a measure of success that has culminated in an Academy Award nomination for Best Live Action Short Film, with the award ceremony only a week away. Everything seems great until Misha is summoned to Harold Brothers Studios. He had been planning to have the two gay leads on his television series Travelers share a passionate kiss in the season finale, but instead he is ordered to either (a) not have them kiss, or (b) kill them off afterwards. Misha, gay himself, is ordered to act out the “Bury Your Gays” trope or be fired for breaking contract.

After talking with his friends and his boyfriend, Misha decides he’s going to stand his ground and fight against the studio’s orders. But then he has an unsettling encounter with someone who looks just like one of the villains from his horror stories, and soon he realizes that his life, and even maybe more, is being threatened by some unknown and seemingly unstoppable force. If they are the characters from his stories, he never wrote any way for them to be defeated…

Bury Your Gays is just a delightfully clever book all the way through. Early on, I had a vague idea of where the story was heading and what the big reveal would be, but the details of the reveal and the resolution of the story were incredibly satisfying and left me feeling rewarded for what I had deduced early on.

I’ve noted a number of times that I personally believe that every memorable book is more than entertainment and is about something, some part of the author’s beliefs or worldview. Bury Your Gays definitely has a lot to say about LGBT issues, their relationship to Hollywood, “rainbow capitalism,” and a few other things that would be somewhat spoiler-y to reveal here. None of this comes across as being preachy or tacked on, and in fact all of these issues are key to the whole story in ways that are natural and make perfect sense. This is very much in line with Tingle’s previous debut horror novel Camp Damascus, which is actually given a brief mention in Bury Your Gays. Does this mean that they are set in the same Tingleverse, or is it just a nod and a wink to his other work? I’m not sure at this point!

As I’ve said, Bury Your Gays is definitely a horror novel, with some ghastly and gruesome scenes in it, but none of it is excessive, and the book has a sense of fun to it, where the frights are designed to thrill and entertain the reader, rather than horrify and appall them. This is roughly the same vibe I get from another favorite author, Orrin Grey, whose work I have talked about before.

Overall, Bury Your Gays is a really fun and clever horror novel, and well-worth a read. I look forward to seeing what Chuck Tingle comes up with next!