I went into Bury Your Gays as a Chuck Tingle first-timer and came out the other side a fan.
The 2024 horror novel imagines a Hollywood where the algorithm doesn’t just inform the creative decisions. It makes them, and it will kill to get its way.
Our guide is Misha Byrne, a screenwriter who has just landed his first Oscar nomination, for best short film.
He is also the man behind Travelers, a long-running streaming series whose two female leads have been circling a romance for years.
Then he is summoned to Harold Brothers Studios and handed an ultimatum for the upcoming finale: keep the leads straight, or let them be gay and kill them off.
The reasoning? The numbers say tragedy sells.
Misha refuses, and that is when the monsters he has spent a career writing start turning up in real life.
I’ll keep this spoiler-light, because half the fun is working out the rules as Misha does.
Hollywood, but only slightly worse
What I enjoyed most was the world Tingle builds around Misha.
Harold Brothers Studios and it’s executive Jack Hays is a fully realised fictional studio, complete with a backlot, cartoon mascots and a water tower, and reviewers have been quick to call it a thinly veiled Warner Bros.
I loved the invented studio (Harold Brothers) and its streamer network HBS, right down to the fake back catalogue. Throughout the book we hear about movies and TV shows included Devil’s Due (a friendly demon is forced to work at a children’s library) and Queereos (gay superheros with no villains to fight). I did have to suspend disbelief that Misha is nominated for an Oscar the same year he is show-running Season 3 of his hit TV series.
The studio’s latest triumph is an AI-generated performance from a long-dead movie star, Chris Oak, which is in the running for an Oscar of its own.
It reads as a look at where the industry could go if algorithms took over everything, and in this book I do mean everything.
The executives aren’t cartoon villains, either. They are people deferring to a system nobody in the room seems able to overrule, which is the properly unsettling part.
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When the trope comes for you
The title comes from a real and long-criticised storytelling habit: queer characters, queer women especially, who are killed off far more readily than their straight counterparts.
TV fans will have their own examples. XXXX’s death in Buffy the Vampire Slayer… “your shirt!” in 2002 is one of the most cited, and Lexa’s exit from The 100 in 2016 sparked a fan backlash that pushed the term into the mainstream.
Tingle’s twist is to make the trope literal.
Once Misha says no, he is stalked by his own creations, including The Smoker, a ghostly figure who puts him on a five-day countdown, and Mrs Why, an alien whose touch leaves her victims in existential despair.
People around the studio start dying in ways that would look right at home in a genre film. A falling piano is involved.
Between the set pieces, flashbacks take us back to Misha’s childhood in Montana, and each one explains where a particular monster came from.
Those chapters are where the book earns its emotional weight. Misha writes queer stories for a living but still isn’t publicly out himself, and the novel knows exactly how uncomfortable that is.
The heart under the gore
For a book with this body count, it is surprisingly warm.
Misha’s best friend Tara, who is asexual and aromantic, and his boyfriend Zeke aren’t there to be collateral. They are in the fight with him, and Tara in particular gets some of the best moments in the book.
Tingle also has plenty to say about rainbow capitalism, and about what happens when a corporation works out that queer joy can be packaged and sold just as easily as queer tragedy.
It isn’t a subtle book. Some readers have found it heavy-handed, and I can see why, but the directness worked for me.
It is fast, funny, gory in a popcorn-movie way and, underneath all of it, hopeful.
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Who is Chuck Tingle?
If the name rings a bell, it is probably for the wrong reasons.
Tingle is a pseudonymous author who appears in public wearing a pink mask and sunglasses, and who first found fame online with self-published gay erotica bearing some truly unhinged titles.
Tingle’s self-published e-books are known for their ridiculous, hyper-specific titles like Pounded in the Butt by My Hugo Award Loss or Space Raptor Butt Invasion.
Bury Your Gays, released in July 2024, is his second horror novel for Tor Nightfire, following 2023’s Camp Damascus.
His guiding motto is “love is real”. This was my first Chuck Tingle. It won’t be my last. I’m eager to try Fabulous Bodies next.