OK, this one's been a long time coming. Chuck Tingle has been self-publishing fiction since 2014 but I've been a fan of his ever since the Rabid Puppies brought him accidental fame when attempting to stack the Hugo ballot in 2016 and he utterly owned it. They got his 'Space Raptor Butt Invasion' onto the final ballot for Best Short Story, but he promptly distanced himself from the campaign to avoid the woke trends they saw in modern sci-fi; announced that, should he win, Zoë Quinn, an anti-harassment activist attacked during Gamergate, would accept on his behalf; and, after losing that final, published 'Pounded in the Butt by My Hugo Award Loss' as a response.

No wonder he became a sensation, what the back cover blurb to this book calls a "beloved internet icon". Most of his work comprises of self-published short erotic gay fiction with outrageous titles, a collection of consensual encounters between men and other men, or maybe cryptids, dinosaurs or a series of unlikely inanimate objects or even metaphysical concepts, often making a sociopolitical point. How else can we receive a title like 'Pounded In The Butt By My Handsome Sentient Library Card Who Seems Otherworldly But In Reality Is Just A Natural Part Of The Priceless Resources Our Library System Provides', especially "from two time Hugo Award finalist Chuck Tingle".

I haven't read any of these stories, though I do admire his sheer imagination and how well he finds the pulse of modern society. However, when he was signed by Tor for a couple of horror novels that would be published by their Nightfire imprint, I was immediately interested and I'm ecstatic to tell people how damn good 'Camp Damascus' is. It doesn't feature a single cryptid or dinosaur or other unlikely candidate for a butt pounding and it doesn't even include any gay sex scenes, but it tells a very important story in a very powerful way. This won't win a Hugo but the horror community may well award it something notable. It deserves it.

It's about Rose Darling, a young lady who lives in Neverton, Montana, home of the Kingdom of the Pine and Camp Damascus. She’s very by-the-book and by book I mean the Bible. She's a devout child of a fundamentalist Christian family so extreme that they wouldn't let her read 'Peter Pan' in class because it included magic. Maybe this explains why she's twenty-years-old but doesn't have a clue that she's been on a date with Isaiah, someone in which she has no romantic interest whatsoever, presumably set up by her parents who think she should be settling down and having kids. We know she likes Martina instead, but she doesn't do anything about that because she loves Jesus more.

However, strange things are happening that she can't explain. For one, she starts puking up flies, a bizarre occurrence explained away far too easily by her parents. For another, she's seeing a woman when she clearly shouldn't, an inhumanly pale woman with entirely white pupil-less eyes. She's up there in the woods when she's diving at the falls opposite on the date she doesn't recognise. She's also there in her house, running into a closet from which she promptly vanishes. As Rose is a bright book-smart girl with a mildly autistic focus, she's driven to investigate these impossibilities, which isolates her a little further from her parents, who don't see her natural curiosity as a good thing.

Something is clearly going on but I can pretty much guarantee that you're not going to guess what it is or what extremes it reaches, unless you happened to grow up within fundamentalist Christian circles and escaped, with the full knowledge of the lengths to which such people are willing to go to achieve what they believe, or what their charismatic leader of choice tells them to believe, is good, right and in the best interests of everyone concerned. Given that the back cover blurb explains the purpose of Camp Damascus, I guess I should point out that gay conversion therapy is the particular focus of this book, but it goes far deeper than that and I don't mean this camp's 100% success rate.

In fact, I'd suggest that as horrific as human beings brainwashing the young and different into not being themselves is, it's not the most horrific thing here. It's that the people who do this do so out of what they believe to be love and devotion for someone they're responsible for, usually their own children. They don't see what they're doing as evil; they honestly believe that anything they can do to prevent their gay children from being gay is the Lord's work. Chuck Tingle, of all people, with his apparently endless set of bizarre fetishes, absolutely nails this horror here by extrapolating it into something that ought to be a step too far but somehow plays out as eerily believable.

I liked Rose, which is important, and I liked what makes her who she is. While she's just a character in a book, who I completely understand is entirely fictional, that weirdly makes me a better parent to her than the ones Tingle provides, parents who love her and only want the best for her. That's a crazy statement to make but it's at the heart of this book and it's what makes it so horrific. It may be important that I'm neither gay nor female but I am a human being. Given that there are eight billion of us, that ought to be a rather low bar to reach, but it's an important one.

I could say more about this and dive into the other characters, one of whom I was pleased to see is a grindcore fan, but it really doesn't matter. What matters is that this is a painfully topical horror novel from an unlikely source that absolutely nails its point. I can't say that it's my favourite novel of 2023, even thus far with half of it still to come, but I may not read a more important book by the time it's over. It's been a few weeks since I read this and it still has the power to make me feel like I've been personally affected by what happens; to make me angry that it does so, even in what's a clearly fictional world; and to hammer home that, while what happens in it is obviously fanciful, it shines a light on very real evils with biting satire and sad truth.

Quite frankly, this should be taught in schools, especially in Florida. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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