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Book Reviewed by:Bury Your Gays is a heart-pounding new novel from USA Today bestselling author Chuck Tingle about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.
Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell.
But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, "for the algorithm," in the upcoming season finale.
Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he's just put a target on his back. And what's worse, monsters from his horror movie days are stalking him and his friends through the hills above Los Angeles.
Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future―before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good.
Bury Your Gays is a horror novel that satirizes modern Hollywood: a world of soulless executives who reanimate dead actors with AI and defer their decisions to the almighty Algorithm. Tingle has no shortage of great, provocative ideas. 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...continued
Full Review
(559 words)
(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).
The meaning behind Bury Your Gays' title becomes clear as soon as oily Harold Bros. executive Jack Hays orders protagonist Misha to do the bidding of the algorithm for the sake of his streaming TV show and kill off two lesbian characters. Author Chuck Tingle is commenting on the cynical use of queer representation in entertainment, especially on streaming television: characters are flaunted for brownie points, then casually discarded when they've served their purpose. But the "bury your gays" trope, in which queer characters are more likely to die than their straight counterparts, has been around for much longer than the likes of Netflix, and these character deaths have been motivated by many different factors.
For a long time, if gay ...
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