Bury Your Gays, by Chuck Tingle

[rachelmanija]

Misha, a closeted TV writer and screenwriter, has two characters he's been building up for a lesbian love story. This is personally important to him due to a traumatizing childhood experience with TV characters he thought might be gay before that rug got yanked, so when his producer orders him to either make them straight or kill them, he refuses. But then he starts getting stalked by the horror characters he created in previous movies...

This is a very fun book with a lot of heart-- it's both metafictional/satirical and very earnest. I enjoyed it quite a bit, but it suffered from being read immediately after Camp Damascus. The latter is just a better book. In particular, this book has several gaping plot holes while Camp Damascus didn't have that issue.



I didn't understand how Zeke and Tara were able to recover from Mrs. Why's nihilism zap just because Misha came out at the Oscars, when previously such a big point was made of the effects being permanent.

I also found it pretty implausible that Misha was able to just disembark from an airplane where there appeared to be a MYSTERY PLAGUE. And what happened to Mrs. Why once the plane landed? Did she get arrested? Did she disappear? Shouldn't Misha be curious about that?



I also liked the Camp Damascus characters and setting better. (Tingle said in an interview that he wrote them both more-or-less at the same time.) That being said, Bury Your Gays is good and inventive and worth reading in its own right. I particularly enjoyed all the media within the book - not just Misha's movies, but his once-beloved X-Files-ish childhood TV series and a homoerotic horror movie where sweaty Marines have to strip each other to cut out a deadly worm.

Content notes: Some intense violence, including a very graphic torture/murder scene. Upsettingly realistic flashbacks to being a queer kid in a homophobic environment.