BookBrowse Reviews Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

BookBrowse:

While its prose is more workmanlike than inspired, a compelling narrative and timely commentary on the entertainment industry make Chuck Tingle's latest worth reading.

Chuck Tingle, for those who don't know, is the pseudonym of an eccentric writer best known for his prolific career in bizarre erotica. Well over 400 stories have been published as ebooks, most with titles like My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass, Open Wide For The Handsome Sabertooth Dentist Who Is Also A Ghost, and My Macaroni And Cheese Is A Lesbian Also She Is My Lawyer. It seemed like an elaborate troll job at first, and an irony-poisoned internet responded in kind. (An alt-right group got Tingle nominated for a Hugo Award, a campaign the author himself has firmly disavowed.) But while Tingle is frequently funny, his body of work is no joke: he is something of an outsider artist, animated by a sex-positive, radically sincere ethos.

Bury Your Gays, Tingle's second mainstream offering after Camp Damascus, is a horror novel that satirizes modern Hollywood as a world of soulless executives who reanimate dead actors with AI and defer their decisions to the almighty Algorithm. One such directive from the C-suite of Harold Bros., a thinly-veiled parody of Warner Bros., is addressed to a cynical screenwriter named Misha Byrne who serves as our narrator. It demands that he kill off a lesbian couple on the TV show he writes for. He's not at all pleased by this, but he's not given much time to process it before he watches a lecherous old bigwig get crushed by a falling piano.

What follows is a sort of queer meditation on pop culture, weaving in threads of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Misha is a frustrated creative forced to suppress his truest self for the sake of his career, just as he suppressed his sexuality growing up in the conservative state of Montana. As in I Saw the TV Glow, a recent film whose queer metafictional horror narrative is not too far removed from Bury Your Gays, nothing good comes from hiding: everything has to come to the surface eventually, and swallowing it only makes it fester.

Tingle has no shortage of great, provocative ideas, and there are plenty of amusing digs at Hollywood that add up over the course of the story. (When Misha asks if the actor resurrected by AI to play a mob boss was even Italian, he receives a stern response that the script didn't specify nationality.) But as imaginative as the author clearly is, his prose rarely does more than get the job done. There's the occasional burst of gnarly imagery (as when the aforementioned bigwig "pops like a water balloon" under the falling piano), but too often Tingle settles for phrases like "breathtakingly large" or describes a gaze as cutting "directly into your soul." Clichés become cliché for a reason, but such vivid ideas deserve equally vivid prose.

Still, it's hard to quibble when you're given a narrative as interesting as this. Simply put, you want to see where the story goes next, and Tingle is adept at making sure you never quite know what's about to happen. And as Hollywood executives seem eager to sacrifice the human condition at the altar of Silicon Valley, it's downright cathartic to see a novel portray algorithms and AI as the existential threats that they clearly are: call it Pounded in the Butt By Corporate Greed and the Insidious Devaluation of the Humanities.

This review first ran in the July 17, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.