Bury Your Gays: Delivers on Hollywood Horror

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

2024’s Bury Your Gays didn’t grab me the way Camp Damascus did, but it definitely pulled me in. It’s a different brand of horror that worked convincingly, and I did love Misha, the main character, a Hollywood writer who is the name in queer horror. Tingle creates a world where what happens in the boardroom is every bit as creepy and terrifying as what happens in a dark alley or deserted city park.

As the story opens, Misha is on top of the world, or should be. He is the showrunner for a successful show called Travelers, in the mode of The X-Files or Fringe, and his live-action short film is in the running for an Oscar. Misha can’t help thinking things are too good to be true… and they are. Right off the bat, we know we’re in a Hollywood slightly different from our own, as Misha studies the banner hung celebrating the studio’s Best Picture candidate—a film “starring” a dead actor who was dead when the film was made. His performance is 100% AI generated.

Misha’s problems are immediate and personal. After seasons of groundwork and foreshadowing, he is going to have his two women agents in Travelers admit their love for each other. He has set it up meticulously. Jack, the studio head, informs him that “the board” has looked at what the algorithms came up with, and Misha has two choices; keep his characters in the closet, or have them come out and then kill one or both off, in a spectacular, heroic way. Misha points out that “Kill Your Gays” is a cliché, but Jack is unmoved. Misha must fall in line or face firing and a protracted legal battle.

At first, Misha seems like a confident man with a strong self-image, ready to fight for his vision—a man with everything going for him, even a perfect boyfriend. Soon, however, the cracks in Misha’s façade start to show. He’s “Hollywood out,” for instance, but still closeted to his family and neighbors back in Montana. Throughout Misha’s childhood, he suffered shaming and physical abuse because of his sexual orientation. He dealt with his inner demons through the genre of horror, creating monsters that sprang from incidents or fears from his childhood. Now those monsters are coming to life and menacing him and his friends. Or are they? There are rumors of strange scenes with Misha across L.A. County, him picking fights or acting weird, in places he doesn’t even remember going. Is somebody smearing him, or is he cracking under the pressure?

The monsters were varied and terrifying in different ways. Adding to the stakes, the monsters target Misha’s friend Tara as well as him. Misha desperately mines his own work for ways to defeat the creatures, while simultaneously trying to write an acceptance speech in case he wins an Oscar, and prepare for a high school reunion.

The high school reunion was the most poignant scene in the book, and the saddest, hands down. On the flight home, Misha encounters one of his monsters on the plane, where there is no escape, and I loved his ingenuity in dealing with it.

In the last third of the book, there is a torture-murder scene that is graphically violent, and it jarred me out of the book. The scene isn’t gratuitous. It’s the turning point, where Misha finally figures out what he is up against, but the change in tone threw me out and I didn’t completely trust the book after that. That is, however the most violent and bloody scene in the book.

Bury Your Gays faithfully follows the horror-movie plot, beat for beat, while bringing in a slightly satirical sensibility, and, simultaneously, raising serious questions about society and our values. Along the way, Tingle creates a personal story about a man finding a way to be himself without doubt or shame. Both the plot’s climax and the book’s ending left me smiling for Misha.

If you love horror movies and dissecting horror movies, you’ll love this book, and you’ll probably enjoy it if you want the illusion of peering behind the veil of Hollywood. It’s well-written, with scary monsters and scrappy protagonists, and, after the horror, provides optimism for anyone who’s been shamed for who they are. In the Tingleverse, love is real, and it can win.