Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
Camp Damascus (2023) starts off as a demonic thriller and ends up as a plucky-kids-fight-humancentric-evil story, in Chuck Tingle’s first non-erotica novel. The author, who had a large audience on X/Twitter, came to the attention of many of us during the 2016 Hugo awards (all scandals aside, don’t say the Hugos never did anything nice for us). Previously known for men/men (or in some cases, men/dinosaur) erotica online, with Camp Damascus Tingle successfully makes the jump to horror, with a mashup of summer-camp horror and demonic possession tale.
Rose is a devout church girl, part of an odd Christian sect, the Kingdom of the Pine, in a small Montana town. The sect runs the town’s single biggest industry, Camp Damascus, a “reorientation program” for teens who might be anything other than cishet. The Camp’s success rate, it claims, is 100%–a big clue right there that something is seriously wrong.
Out on an after-school jaunt to the river with other school kids, Rose can’t help noticing how pretty her classmate Martina is. Shortly after thinking that, Rose sees a strange woman standing on the other side of the water. The woman looks creepy, with lank hair and eyes that are entirely white. Weirdest of all, she wears a polo shirt with a nametag. Rose dismisses this as her imagination, just like the chills and cold-flashes she’s been getting lately. That evening, at home, thinking about Martina over dinner, Rose suddenly coughs up a swarm of mayflies. She is horrified, and her parents seem shocked, but they adjust quickly. Really quickly. That evening, Rose sees the white-eyed woman in the house.
While Rose is worried at these manifestations, her parents and her therapist assure her that prayer will take care of it. All the adult authority figures, though, tell Rose that her curiosity is a problem and that she should rely on faith rather than research. Rose is a research genius who cannot stop seeking answers, even when Martina is strangely and brutally murdered at a church birthday party, right after Rose sees the name-tagged woman yet again.
Something is clearly wrong, and not with Rose. At a local park, she encounters a girl she has seen in dreams and memories, but that girl rebuffs her. Driving home, Rose is attacked by another being like the one she’s seen. Rose figures out how to kill it, and because she sees the name on its nametag, she knows it’s a demon. From there, Rose sets out on a quest to get answers, and the answers lead to something twisted, sick and eerily plausible in the heart of Camp Damascus. (All the demons wear polo shirts and nametags, for a good reason—and Rose recognizes the names, from her research, as demonic ones. Those nametags are one of the creepiest things in the book.)
The demonic beings are frightening, especially once we realize they can kill, but one of the most disturbing scenes for me is almost mundane, and happens near the beginning of the book. Rose is in her room and her father is talking to her. She asks him to close the door behind him, and he reminds her that there is no door on her room’s doorframe. There has never been a door, he says. Rose can see that the doorframe is smooth, with no sign hinges have been removed… but she remembers a door. Rose, trying to be an obedient child and a faithful church-girl, can’t quite accept what she knows—someone’s messed with her mind.
I loved the narrative voice of Rose. In the beginning, I found her desperate drive to believe and fit in compelling. As the story progresses, Rose struggles with the nature of faith, since hers has been so corrupted and exploited by the adults around her. Her autism is a strength here, as she refuses to stop researching. Along the way she finds an ally in Saul, a former camp counsellor at Damascus. Now he restores cars and listens to Christian metal. Saul’s investigation leads them to an old book with some strange Latin prayers, and those captivate Rose. Tingle strips away the layers of the holy and “well-meaning” adults of the Church of the Kingdom of the Pine, revealing them for the controlling oppressors they are.
Rose also reconnects with Willow, the girl she saw at the park—the girl she loves. Both of them were sent to Camp Damascus, which they didn’t remember because the Camp Damascus “process” includes memory erasure. At the end of the book, Rose, Willow and Saul sneak into the camp to find the complex where the assignments are committed. They plan to put an end to the “reorientation” once and for all.
I thought the ending, in the underground complex, had too much detail, which tended to becalm the story and dulled the suspense. I also wish we’d gotten to know a little more about Saul. Overall, though, the book delivers with the demonic-horror aspect, and the teens-fighting-the-conspiracy aspect. The demons themselves are creepy but nowhere near as creepy as Rose’s “therapist,” Dr. Smith, and Pastor Bend. Camp Damascus is a triumphant and original entry in the summer camp horror subgenre.
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