25. A book released in 2023: Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

List Progress: 20/30

Religion has been used as a weapon against so many people, and those who have been victims to it can find themselves adrift as they try to sort out their feelings about faith, belief and their own place in the cosmos. Rose Darling, the protagonist of 2023’s Camp Damascus, has spent all twenty years of her life in the Kingdom of the Pines community, peacefully living as a member of this conservative cult in small-town Montana. When she learns a twisted truth about the cult’s titular famous gay conversion camp, her whole world shifts on its axis and she has to reevaluate everything she has ever known. The emotional impact has to come together very quickly to keep up with the fast-moving plot, and the end results feel a bit rushed, but the journey of faith is still an engaging one to take with Rose.

Chuck Tingle is internet-famous as the pseudonymous author of scores of self-published gay erotica, such as My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass  and Bigfoot Sommelier Butt Tasting, and parody works like Trans Wizard Harriet Porber And The Bad Boy Parasaurolophus: An Adult Romance Novel. Camp Damascus is his first mainstream publication, and the novel takes itself seriously while still having a sense of both fun and the surreal. The imagery of the first half of the novel, as Rose’s eyes are gradually opened to the horrors around her, is haunting and creepy, and the most effective scare is by far the most subtle (“What door?”). 

But the returns are somewhat diminishing when Rose makes a break for freedom at the middle point of the book. She is startlingly clear-eyed for a twenty-year-old who just deprogrammed herself from a lifetime in a cult, and it would have been more poignant for her to still have the cobwebs of the conformist mindset lingering even after her break away. And a late-arriving character who is still strongly religious after escaping Kingdom of the Pines feels like a blatant attempt to “have it both ways” and deflect accusations of the book being anti-religion. The build-up to the climax manages to both over- and under-explain a lot of the rules of this world and that is more than a bit frustrating.

Camp Damascus is not the tightest novel in the world, and it does feel like Tingle’s first time having to wrangle this long of a page count.  But for all its flaws, it is easy to fall in love with the blunt and awkward Rose and go on this journey with her. And the more pieces of media that call out the absolute cruelty and evil of conversion therapy, the better. Tingle’s mainstream novels may evolve with time, but the spirit is already there.

Would I Recommend It: Yes.