REVIEW: Bury Your Gays (book) by Chuck Tingle

Bury Your Gays is horror. I bought my copy new.

This review includes slight spoilers. 

Review:

Most would call Misha a successful screenwriter. He just got an Oscar nomination for a live action short film of his, and he has a popular long-running streaming series. Things are different now than when he was a kid, watching his favorite TV show and seeing the queer subtext he knew was there get stomped out. He has a wonderful boyfriend, and he's spent his whole career making the kind of queer movies and shows he'd have liked to see when he was younger.

Unfortunately, Hollywood is ruled by numbers and greed, and the numbers are telling his studio's board that it would be best if he either cut the romance brewing between the two female main characters in his show, or only allow them to kiss if one of them then gets killed off. Misha has no intention of choosing either option, although this will likely lead to a legal battle between him and his studio.

It's horrible, infuriating, and stressful. Then events rapidly recalibrate what Misha defines as "stressful." He witnesses a man being killed by a falling piano only a few feet away. He's approached by what he initially thinks is a fan cosplaying as one of the creepy monsters he once wrote...but the makeup and special effects are a little too good. Then things happen that couldn't possibly be set up by even a handful of rabid fans.

The monsters were wonderfully creepy (I particularly loved the lamb), but the horror here turned out to be a lot more than a few eldritch horrors run amok. As Misha tried to figure out how to keep himself and his friends from being killed by monsters and curses that he himself wrote, there were flashbacks that showed the inspiration for the current-day horrors in Misha's past. The bit with Uncle Keith, while completely bloodless, was so intense I had to take a break partway through. And this is in a book that features a literal on-page torture scene. (I had to take a break during that scene too. Yeesh.)

I figured out some of what was going on with the monsters fairly early on, but that in no way ruined things for me, because my mind didn't make the full leap to the ice cold motivation behind everything, and just how far it went. 

I got a kick out of the way Tingle essentially weaponized asexual invisibility - three cheers for Tara! Zeke, on the other hand, seemed a little too perfect and just...there. But that's a fairly nitpicky complaint about a book that I, on the whole, really enjoyed.