Audiobook Review: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

 

 

 

10 hours, Audible Audio

Published July , 2024 by Macmillan Audio

 

 André Santana (Narrator), Charlie Jane Anders (Narrator), CJ Leede (Narrator), Georgia Bird (Narrator), Liz Kerin (Narrator), Mara Wilson (Narrator), Mark Oshiro (Narrator), Sarah Gailey (Narrator), Stephen Graham Jones (Narrator), T. Kingfisher (Narrator), TJ Klune (Narrator)

 

“They say you know it’s love when someone offers to drive you to LAX, and right now I’m feeling the love.” 

I need to make my normal disclaimer that audio doesn’t get the deep kind of reviews I can normally offer with a prose book that said. I loved this novel, but when I searched for a hardcopy from my library, I would have had months to wait but the Libby app had the audiobook right away. 

I am aware of the Chuck Tingle persona. I respect a man so powerfully committed to the schtick that he wears a pink bag over his head for entire conventions. He got his start selling dinosaur-themed gay erotica, the titles were funny enough that they went viral. I heard they were funny but I never checked them out. Around the time of Tingle’s first serious horror novel, I heard him on a podcast, I think This Is Horror. Now he was on my radar. I had meant to check out his work. It was seeing Tingle on panels at Stokercon that pushed me to commit to it.

I didn’t read anything about the plot, characters, or settings. I knew nothing about the novel except the title. Even talking about the genre is a bit of a spoiler, and it is one I didn’t have. This novel is a masterwork of Set-up and pay-off, parallels and reversals, all the stuff I enjoy. It is satire for an industry that is centered mostly in one city so it is a novel of that city. I loved it, and enjoyed the audiobook presentation so yes before I break down, I really like this one.  

It might be in my top ten at the end of the year, so yeah read it. OK, we are going to get into minor spoilers and I will give a warning again before heavy spoilers.

Bury Your Gays is an LA/Hollywood dark satire told through a science fiction horror lens. The SF aspects were elements that surprised me greatly. It is effective horror and Sci-fi so when I say satire I mean the dark kind. There are plenty of laughs, but some scenes like the Mrs. Why on the plane are effective suspense and terror, and much of the story is moving when it needs to be.

 

Misha is a screenwriter, who has built a career on queer-coded horror movies. He is writing the season finale of his X-files like TV-series and is excited to finally bring two characters out of the closet and together. He has been building for three seasons to get to this point and his producer Jack who now works for the studio tells him he must kill the characters.

“In film, in TV, in books... the queer characters never get a happy ending," I press. "Sometimes they're the first to go, other times they make some brave sacrifice in the finale, but it always ends in tragedy and death. That's why it's called bury your gays.”

This inner dialogue explains why Misha, (who is LA-out, but not hometown-out), is disgusted. The studio orders him to kill the characters, but he refuses and then the battle begins.  The studio threatens to fire him and sue him if he doesn’t do it. He has worked his whole career for HBS, a Tingle verse stand-in for Warner Brothers. He is nominated for an Oscar for a short film he made, but the studio is focused on its nomination for a dead actor they re-created with AI.

Misha starts to wonder if he is losing his mind. The very monsters he created in his screenplays begin to stalk him, his scared reactions to this go viral and his life starts to fall apart.  His very own creations.  This first act of the novel has Wes Craven’s New Nightmare vibes in a really good way.

This is a horror novel that is a Meta-level comment on Storytelling, writing horror, and writing for the industry, and Hollywood in general. It also comments on living in LA. The structure of this narrative is nearly perfect. With interludes to Misha growing up and scenes in screenplay format (those were acted out with the voice talent of other authors.) the structure is a part of it all.   (also major spoilers ahead…I mean it)

“The beats of this particular story are music to my ears, and I'm certainly not complaining, but they're not the beats I'm used to. Then again, not everything has a perfect structure: a beginning, middle, and end. Not every tale has an act-three synthesis and a dark night of the soul.

Sometimes life just is.”

This made me laugh because the structure is nearly perfect. The mystery of the first half works well enough that I wasn’t quite sure which direction it would go and when it did I didn’t see it coming.  The novel is not just themed on Hollywood Greed although it is…

“You know who the real villain is?” I continue, strolling through the lobby and joining a line of other writers, directors, cinematographers, and actors as they filter inside to find their seats. “Unchecked capitalism and the desire for capitalist systems to monetize other people’s trauma.”

But also one of the most debated topics connected to the creative industries, the use of AI, and one of the neatest magic tricks is Tingle took the writer’s current boogeyman, AI, and made it into the monster of the story. Well Nano-bot storms created by AI, the HBS studio uses technology to create living avatars of their intellectual properties. One reason why this is such a smart satire is because the monster is IP itself. Everything is IP in Hollywood baby.

 The novel works out with multiple twists and this story’s version of ‘You Think You Beat the Monster’ is a victory for Gay Hollywood…

“We've got trans-Mothman, we've got a gay goblin, we've got bi Mrs. Why.”

These scenes are funny, and depressing at the same time. Hollywood often learns the wrong lessons. That said Micha learns the right lesson and that is the powerful part of the book. Micha has a very important arc, but what impresses me most is that it comments on important themes that are so well woven into the story. 

Bury Your Gays is a fantastic piece of LBGTQ themes Science fiction and horror, it should appeal to all readers who are fans of the horror genre, Science Fiction fans I am not so sure. The novel is science fiction but it leans more towards horror and satire.  If I could give it more than a perfect five stars I would. Excellent stuff.