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Summary and Reviews of Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle

Bury Your Gays

by Chuck Tingle
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  • Jul 9, 2024, 304 pages
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About This Book

Book Summary

Bury Your Gays is a heart-pounding new novel from USA Today bestselling author Chuck Tingle about what it takes to succeed in a world that wants you dead.

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.

MEMENTO MORI

The backlot is humming with energy today, and I'm not thrilled about it. Rolling up to the east security gate is typically a surefire way to cruise right in and get any tedious studio afternoon over with, but I've discovered a line of five or six cars waiting for me.

It's always something with this place, and today that something is poor traffic management.

I settle in, watching April at the security booth as she flashes her welcoming smile at each producer, actor, writer, and director making their way through the checkpoint.

I can't quite see who she's talking to, the rising California sun washing my eyes in its golden glow. Even through these dark sunglasses it's hard to get a read on the driver of the McLaren with the scissor doors and obnoxious paint job, but a shock of stark white hair hints at Raymond Nelson, head of the animation department and real-deal Hollywood legend. This would make sense, as he rarely keeps the same car for more than a month and I've yet to ...

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Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Bury Your Gays is a horror novel that satirizes modern Hollywood: a world of soulless executives who reanimate dead actors with AI and defer their decisions to the almighty Algorithm. Tingle has no shortage of great, provocative ideas. But as imaginative as the author clearly is, his prose rarely does more than get the job done. There's the occasional burst of gnarly imagery (as when the aforementioned bigwig "pops like a water balloon" under the falling piano), but too often Tingle settles for phrases like "breathtakingly large" or describes a gaze as cutting "directly into your soul." Clichés become cliché for a reason, but such vivid ideas deserve equally vivid prose. Still, it's hard to quibble when you're given a narrative as interesting as this...continued

Full Review Members Only (559 words)

(Reviewed by Joe Hoeffner).

Media Reviews

CrimeReads
Bury Your Gays, along with last year's Camp Damascus, cements Tingle's place as one of the best new novelists around, horror or otherwise.

Lit Hub
Bury Your Gays is Tingle's best work yet. It deserves to be the literary equivalent of a massive summer blockbuster.... If you were on the picket lines last year, if original stories are important to you, if you too believe that love is real(!), then this one is for you—even if you don't think you like horror, you're gonna devour this.

Booklist (starred review)
Tingle burst onto the traditional publishing scene with one of the best books of 2023 (Camp Damascus), but his follow-up is even better ... taking readers on a highly entertaining, fast-paced ride, filled with thought-provoking satire, original monsters, and some of the most realistic characters they will encounter on any page, all to prove that love is real and horror itself is, at its core, a celebration of life.

Library Journal (starred review)
Captivating and creative, Tingle continues breathing new life into old tropes with a gory examination of art and the lives that fuel it.

Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Tingle cements his place in horror with this gory romp...[his] vivid, visceral storytelling combines with prescient insight into the corporate dynamics that rule mainstream media. The result is smart, subtle, and a bloody good time.

Author Blurb CJ Leede, author of Maeve Fly
This triumph of a book effortlessly and cleverly upends cliche. One of the best novels ever about LA, the film industry, and horror movies, it delivers all the fandom, fear, and feels, and then some. Only Chuck Tingle can tell a story as masterfully as this, and he once again proves that love is so real.

Author Blurb Josh Winning, author of Burn the Negative and Heads Will Roll
RIP gay clichés! Wickedly funny and hella entertaining, this takes great pride in digging up Hollywood's skeletons and gleefully pounding them to dust. I loved every eerie, nostalgic, blood-spattered, rainbow-flag-waving page.

Author Blurb Rachel Harrison, national bestselling author of Black Sheep
Brilliantly bloody, wildly fun, and extremely scary, Bury Your Gays brings a sledgehammer down on tired tropes and makes a masterpiece of their guts. A profoundly smart and emotionally resonant novel that is sprinkled with cinema magic and a brutal Hollywood reckoning.

Reader Reviews

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Beyond the Book



The "Bury Your Gays" Trope

A television set with a rainbow flag insideThe meaning behind Bury Your Gays' title becomes clear as soon as oily Harold Bros. executive Jack Hays orders protagonist Misha to do the bidding of the algorithm for the sake of his streaming TV show and kill off two lesbian characters. Author Chuck Tingle is commenting on the cynical use of queer representation in entertainment, especially on streaming television: characters are flaunted for brownie points, then casually discarded when they've served their purpose. But the "bury your gays" trope, in which queer characters are more likely to die than their straight counterparts, has been around for much longer than the likes of Netflix, and these character deaths have been motivated by many different factors.

For a long time, if gay ...

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