Oh, there's a lot here! Last year, having heard a lot about Chuck Tingle but not having read any of his books, mostly bizarrely titled e-book erotica with extreme social comment, I was eager to dive into what seemed to be his first traditional horror novel and 'Camp Damascus' blew me away. It did something new in the horror genre that was thoroughly topical but entirely natural, with far more incisive commentary than it had any right to contain, given how thoroughly accessible it seemed. So, of course, I'm in like Flynn for his next title, 'Bury Your Gays'. It impressed me quickly but didn't seem to match its illustrious predecessor. As it ran on, though, I started to realise just how clever it is and how much it does. Now, I'm thinking it may be better.

We're in Hollywood at the Harold Brothers studio, clearly a fictional take on Warner Brothers all the way down to its famous water tower and boss named Jack. They're even more important in this fictional world than their real life counterparts because they've nailed AI. Chris Oak is newly Oscar-nominated for a film that was shot three years after his death, because they recreated his likeness so well that they're not still stuck in the uncanny valley like every other studio on the planet. This is groundbreaking stuff and clearly even more topical for us than the gay conversion therapy stuff in 'Camp Damascus'.

The lead is Misha Byrne, who's a writer at Harold Brothers and made his name writing a bunch of queer horror features but has just been Oscar-nominated himself for Best Live Short. His boss, the Jack I mentioned above, has called him in because the board is concerned about where he's going with the season three finale of his TV show 'Travelers'. Misha has been building up to the moment when a pair of his female agents are going to kiss, but Harold Brothers are nixing that. They want him to take the show in a different direction and to literally kill off his gay characters.

There's serious precedent for all of this in real life. Obviously, this is one reason why the book has the title it does, but it's also the current name of a powerful pop culture trope. Previously known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome, it's the fact that LGBT characters are far more likely to die than straight characters, for a bunch of reasons. One is that they're perceived as more expendable, an idea perhaps rooted in the perception that gays can't reproduce and thus have no function in life, at least in a traditional sense. Another is that they're often only there as token characters to play to a known audience and, once they've appeared and checked that box, they're no longer needed.

Another important note is that Jack's surname is Hays, clearly a nod to Will Hays, who forced the Production Code onto Hollywood in 1934, censoring all studio output. Of course, it became known as the Hays Code and it stopped the use of profanity, nudity and drugs, plus relationships across racial boundaries, criminals getting away with their crimes and even married couples sharing the same bed. Tellingly, through coded language ("sex perversion"), it also effectively prohibited gay characters except as basic comedy stereotypes or as overt villains. While it's fair to say that Jack's only the messenger here, he's very well-named.

Finally, this becomes a dramatic question, because Misha has been given an ultimatum. He's well-liked and much respected by his bosses, so he can always swallow his pride, tow the corporate line and play into a trope he hates in order to keep his job. Or, of course, he can maintain his integrity, exercise the final cut clause in his contract and out his characters, knowing that he'll be out of his job in a flash and likely blacklisted by the industry. Beyond being a valid question to throw at the lead character in a novel in 2024, it also has historical precedent.

William Haines was the biggest box office star in Hollywood in 1930 but he was gay and didn't hide it. In 1933, Louis B. Mayer, head of MGM, gave him a similar ultimatum to the one Jack Hays gives Misha Byrne. Either give up his relationship with his boyfriend, Jimmie Shields, at least as far as the public is concerned, by entering into a lavender marriage with a woman, or lose his career. He chose Jimmie, with whom he stayed until his death 47 years later (Joan Crawford called them "the happiest married couple in Hollywood"), so Mayer fired him and his screen career was effectively over.

It's fascinating for me, as a film historian, to see a horror novel so obviously about today—with all its ties to generative AI, current tropes and the recent Hollywood strikes—also be so grounded in cinematic history. I don't believe Tingle mentions Billy Haines, the pre-code era or the production code that ended it, leading to a paradigm shift in American pop culture, but they're all over 'Bury Your Gays' like a rash. It's a glorious way to point out that we've been here before in so many ways and history is full of circles.

With all that gloriously set in motion, this doesn't seem to go anywhere for a while. It's transitory and episodic. Misha moves through the city, with his boyfriend Zeke, who's bi, and his best friend Tara, who's ace, both asexual and aromantic. Things happen, but we start to wonder if there's an overarching plot. Where is Tingle taking us? Sure, there are details that seem to mean something but we don't know how they fit. A cartoon legend is killed at Harold Brothers with brutal irony, as a piano falls on his head in the parking lot. There's a documentarian who's making a film about all the queer kids who grew up to be icons only to commit suicide. Jack Hays tells Misha that "there's still an audience for the organic stuff".

However, it all seems to be about theme rather than plot. It's about queer tragedy, queer erasure and the romanticisation of gay trauma in the media. It doesn't appear to be really about Misha at all, until we realise that Tingle's pulled off a pretty neat literary trick, so neat that we don't really realise it until Misha realises it and it may take a little while for it to truly sink in.

Put simply, Chuck Tingle is a writer who writes stories about fictional characters. One such fictional character is Misha Byrne who's also a writer who writes stories about fictional characters. While he tries to figure out whether he's going to change his story and his characters to meet the demands of his employers, he starts to become the story himself. The studio—because who else could it be?—is peppering his reality with manifestations of fictional characters that he's created, prompting the media to pay attention.

This begins when the Smoker appears outside a restaurant, looking and behaving exactly as Misha wrote him to do in a movie called 'Death Bloom'. He thinks it's a fan doing cosplay, but it's creepily effective. Then he's confronted with the black lamb from 'Black Lamb', another character that he created for a movie. And then he finds himself on a plane with Mrs. Why, from his show 'Travelers'. The media thinks that it must be Misha himself building publicity ahead of his potential Oscar win, but Misha thinks it's the studio threatening him ahead of his decision about his script. The writer becomes the story.

And so we realise that Chuck Tingle has the same decision to make. Is he going to find a resolution for Misha's woes or is he going to let the Smoker kill him off, in accordance to the rules that he has to follow as a fictional character? He can let Misha win and create a new moment for queer culture in his particular reality, or he can allow Harold Brothers to successfully spin the life of their writer into a queer tragedy in the media. After all, if 'Bury Your Gays' is a book about how queer tragedy sells, is it also going to be a queer tragedy so that it sells? It all suddenly feels incredibly meta, so much so that it's easy to read more into what's going on that might actually be there.

For instance, it starts powerfully, but then seems to lose its way for much of the first act and all of the second, only to go into overdrive in the third and wrap up majestically. Typically, I'd see this as a flaw. Books aren't supposed to lose their way, even if we only think they do at the time. However, this is as much about Hollywood as it is about gay people. That arc is an absolute mirror of the arc of gay people in Hollywood; are we supposed to see that as coincidence? The powerful start is the precode era. The losing of the way is the Production Code era, including Hollywood's Golden Age, whose films were scrubbed clean of gay people largely, rather ironically, by gay people. The third act is right now.

And that brings 'Bury Your Gays' right back to being topical again. The more I think about this, the more it seems to accomplish. It's a good novel. It's also a heck of a lot more than that. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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