Review: Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

Title: Bury Your Gays

Author: Chuck Tingle

Length: 297 Pages

Category: Horror

Rating: 5 Stars

At a Glance: Tingle went all out to make sure readers get the message of this story. It’s sharp, clever, fun, and the characters speak eloquently to the points he meant to make. With ~~a little~~ a lot of blood and bludgeoning thrown in too.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Misha knows that chasing success in Hollywood can be hell.

But finally, after years of trying to make it, his big moment is here: an Oscar nomination. And the executives at the studio for his long-running streaming series know just the thing to kick his career to the next level: kill off the gay characters, “for the algorithm,” in the upcoming season finale.

Misha refuses, but he soon realizes that he’s just put a target on his back. And what’s worse, monsters from his horror movie days are stalking him and his friends through the hills above Los Angeles.

Haunted by his past, Misha must risk his entire future―before the horrors from the silver screen find a way to bury him for good.

Review: Chuck Tingle takes on Hollywood, queer-baiting, queer happy endings, Artificial Intelligence, and proving that love is real (of course) in Bury Your Gays. He does it bloody, he does it brilliantly, and he puts some familiar tropes under his microscope too. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this book. What I got was so much more than I expected.

“On a long enough timeline, endings are inevitable. Tragedy is inevitable. Fortunately, so is joy.”

Misha Byrne is a screenwriter with a string of horror projects to his credit. His most critically successful project to date, however, is a short film that’s just earned him an Oscar nomination. His most beloved and personal project, though, is a streaming show called Travelers (think The X-Files), starring two female agents Misha has spent the past couple of seasons setting up to fall in love on screen. The only problem is that the studio doesn’t want queer joy; the studio demands queer sacrifice. In short, the machine wants Misha to churn out a story where his heroines kiss and then die in a blaze of glory. No happily-ever-afters wanted.

Misha’s artistic defiance leads to some bizarre goings-on, namely some of the horror characters he’s created over the years stalking him in the real world. How this is happening is as much a mystery as the why of it, and Misha must save himself from a tragic and gruesome ending before time runs out. How he’s going to accomplish that is what makes this book such a bone-chilling and adrenaline pumping read.

Tingle went all out to make sure readers get the message of this story. It’s sharp, clever, fun, and the characters speak eloquently to the points he meant to make. Misha, his boyfriend, Zeke, and his best friend, Tara, take on the establishment all while fighting monsters and working to upset the status quo. The question of who and what is real, and isn’t, adds to the suspense of Misha not only preparing for the Oscars but surviving long enough to actually get there. When I tell you it’s close . . . phew.

Bury Your Gays is a statement book, its messages eloquent when Misha finally speaks out loud and clear—queer characters are wanted, needed, celebrated, multi-faceted, and everyone belongs. Representation matters to folks who just want to be seen and heard.