March 22nd - Camp Damascus (Chuck Tingle)

5/5

I have not read a full book in a long while, so the fact that Camp Damascus had me finishing it in three hours was a shock. Equally shocking were the contents themselves. I figured I would enjoy the book, seeing it's praises sung from multiple other authors, and my previous enjoyment of Chuck, but was completely blindsided by the actual narrative itself.

I knew Camp Damascus was a horror novel about a gay conversion camp, but other than that I went into the book blind. What I originally thought was going to be a story about a girl being sent to a conversion camp for her attraction to her friend ended up being a far denser mystery about a girl who had already been there, had her memory wiped, and was constantly being gaslit about it by her entire community.

The horror aspect hits the ground running, with the main character Rose throwing up mayflies at the dinner table only three scenes in, and that's only the beginning. Chuck Tingle finds an excellent balance between supernatural horror and horror found in our reality. I was almost more afraid of the people in Rose's life and their plans and gaslighting more than I was afraid of the demons posing more immediate physical harm.

Under all this, there's a touching story of Rose finding people who truly care about her for who she is, and finding her own agency as a person outside of church doctrine. Saul and Willow, the people Rose comes to know as her found family, feel like people I could meet and talk to, not just characters serving a narrative. They are full of contradiction and complexity that makes me want to befriend them myself. Maybe that's because I currently run with a bunch of queer people, goths, and metalheads already.

I also appreciate what the book had to say about religion and the existence of it's concepts. It doesn't condemn Christianity, but how it's used, and lands in a place eerily similar to my own preexisting thoughts on maybe not religion, but at least the supernatural: "anything could be real, and we just don't have the explanation for it yet." It's a very open approach, and one that I feel leaves room for faith for those who want it.

Overall, the narrative is tight, nothing is wasted and everything feels like it's something that should be paid attention to. One quick scroll through the Camp Damascus tag on Chuck's tumblr has already revealed to me foreshadowing that I had missed, and how much was truly set up from the beginning. An absolutely wonderful read that had me dreading the next pages without being able to put it down.

(Side note: this was not something the narrative needed at all, but as a trans person I do wonder how someone who is trans would find the dissonance between the repression and mind wiping vs their desires in gender affirmation. Lots of horrific potential there.)