A searing and earnest horror debut about the demons the queer community faces in America, the price of keeping secrets, and finding the courage to burn it all down.
They’ll scare you straight to hell.
Welcome to Neverton, Montana: home to a God-fearing community with a heart of gold.
Nestled high up in the mountains is Camp Damascus, the self-proclaimed “most effective” gay conversion camp in the country. Here, a life free from sin awaits. But the secret behind that success is anything but holy.
I don’t know why I put off Camp Damascus. I was expecting a summer camp mystery-horror and got something completely different.
As before, Chuck Tingle dishes out an excellent story filled with longing, anger, and an intense love for those who have been under-served and wronged in this world. The religious trauma is heavy, taking aim at the twisted faiths that use their rhetoric to oppress and shame people. Rose’s crisis of faith is a real one, one that I found myself going through as well when I was younger (granted, much younger— y’all escaped the timeline where the Bible was my special interest, and only because my dad gave me a huge book of dinosaurs).
I loved that Rose was autistic in a very familiar way. It’s never debilitating but often helpful. It helps win the day. It helps show who is friendly and who is shitty. It provides interesting facts to me. It’s wholly lovely.
And as before, Chuck Tingle’s imagination is nuts. I marvel at the twists and turns, the practicalities and the dodging of classic tropes. I never really expected what I got and that’s a good thing here.
It’s a sincere book, a fun book, and a book that says, “You see how ridiculous this shit is? Stop it.”
