Title: Camp Damascus
Author: Chuck Tingle
Publisher: Tor Nightfire
Length: 256 Pages
Category: Horror
Rating: 5 Stars
At a Glance: Chuck Tingle poured a lot of feeling into this novel, and it resonates. Camp Damascus is a story about a young woman growing up and growing away from her childhood, becoming her own person, told in the most extreme of ways. Horror fans should grab it.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: 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.
And they’ll scare you straight to hell.
Review: “Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.” – Robert Frost
Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus is a masterpiece of Horror. As a fan of the genre, I don’t say that lightly or use the term indiscriminately. This book examines grooming and indoctrination from the point of view of the incurious, those who fear to interrogate the world around them outside the purview of an ancient mythology that repeatedly contradicts itself, a mythology that was conceived many millennia before man had the capacity to conceptualize the vastness of life and its multitudes. The book isn’t anti-religion, though; it’s an examination of a distorted version of faith, of love, of imposing beliefs on others without their consent, and what that means for Rose Darling.
“It’s almost as if the Bible can be twisted into supporting whatever point of view you want.”
Rose’s memories of Camp Damascus are beginning to resurface while her strictly forbidden capacity for secular curiosity begins to outgain her religious training. Rose is the child of two parents who believed it would be better to have an obedient husk of a daughter than a gay one. They not only agreed to but participated in the extreme measures the camp, its counsellors, and its religious leader went to to suppress the nature of the children who are tortured there. Tough love is what they call it, but it’s a bastardization of the word love in every way. Their methods do not follow the directive that “love does not insist on its own way,” and it’s here that Tingle gives readers some delicious chills.
“The church makes the same assurance to all parents who abandon their sons and daughters in this terrible place, claiming they’ll fix something. But they’re wrong.”
For as chilling as Camp Damascus is, it’s also triumphant and my heart soared in the end, as Rose discovers an untapped well of strength and courage and, best of all, love and acceptance. Not only the love of the girl she’d lost to the blankness left from her time at the camp but the love of a best friend and found family as well as acceptance within a faith that had abandoned her. Rose becomes the champion of her own story, and I rooted for her every step of the way.
Chuck Tingle poured a lot of feeling into this novel, and it resonates. He materializes the transformative power of compassion and kindness through a story that is meant to ask pointed questions about obedience and submission to a flawed extremist. Rose’s autism is also displayed early in the story as stimming before it’s named; it’s simply another facet of who she is and a testament to her parents’ inadequacies at the one job they were required to be good at. Camp Damascus is a story about a young woman growing up and growing away from her childhood, becoming her own person, told in the most extreme of ways. Horror fans should grab it.
You can buy Camp Damascus here: