Publisher - Titan
Published – out now
Price – £9.99 paperback £5.49 ebook
Misha is a jaded scriptwriter working in Hollywood, and he’s seen it all. All the toxic personalities and coverups, the structural obstructions to reform, even dead actors brought back to screen by CGI – and finally, maybe, the hint of change.
But having just been nominated for his first Oscar, Misha is pressured by his producers to kill off a gay character in the upcoming season finale―"for the algorithm"―on the same day he witnesses to gruesome death-by-piano of treasured animator (and notorious creep) Raymond Nelson.
Success, it seems, isn’t the answer to everything.
With the help of his best friend and paranoid database queen, Tara, and his boyfriend, Zeke, Misha has face down his traumatic childhood and past mistakes. But in a paranoid industry that thinks nothing of killing off talent, it’s not so simple to find a way to do what’s right
There is a constant tension between art and business. Evee artists need money to eat but the people they work with tend to focus on the numbers. This is true in publishing and can be seen in the movie business. Why try something new when another rebooted reimagining starring whats his name is going to fill the aisles with little effort. In the 2020s we increasingly see how those upstairs feels that technology can no doubt cut a few more humans out of the picture. This is a key theme behind Chuck Tingle’s excellent horror novel Bury The Gays which explores the darker and bloodier side of Hollywood but also is a rallying call to the power of art.
Misha is a man in his forties at a crossroads. A successful screenwriter who has just been nominated for an Oscar for a short film. However, his labour of love supernatural TV show has incurred the wrath of the executives who feel that rather having two central characters enter a long term finally lesbian relationship its now key for ratings that one of them dies. He has just realised he is actually himself in a happy long-term relationship himself with his boyfriend but knows he also has a school reunion to go back home to where no one really knows he is gay. While that is going on though is stunned to see people acting as the characters from the many horror movies he has written. People so alarmingly like them that he soon realises they mean something terrible is coming.
This is a really good mix of Hollywood satire, horror story and a look at what art is for. It works very much thanks to how Tingle uses Misha as our first person narrator. He is sympathetic but with a wry sense of humour at the ridiculousness of the business but also a fundamentally decent person. We get the sense something is off from Misha watching a notorious letch in animation getting squashed by a falling piano. Which loses comedy when you’re covered in his blood and gore! What unfolds is a taut tale of Misha himself getting strange visitors and they clearly mean no good and indeed start to threaten anyone around them. Tingle is very good at shifting gears from humour into terror and the sight of a man known as the Smoker who grinds bones into cigarettes and the uncanny valley of Mrs Why who can show you what reality is really like…which will send you mad. These scenes really pull you into a sense of danger and that these are not jokes but traps Misha needs to escape.
Both of which really support the book’s wider exploration of two themes. The increasing business focus of Hollywood is scene with Misha being tormented for not wanting his gay characters to live but we also get in the wider tale exploration of how the Hollywood machine just wants content for profit and cares little for cause or art. This ties very neatly into the horror part of the tale. But as we get to understand Misha we also start to hear about what inspired his collections as a young man coming to terms with being gay in an intolerant America. Much of his work has been subtext and in this story Tingle explores the power of moving those characters and themes out of the shadows and what that means for Misha himself. A horror story that helps explain why art is so important to being human is very rare but Tingle does a great job in revealing why this is needed.
Bury Your Gays is a fantastically entertaining, gripping and intelligent horror story that has capitalism in its sights but also pulls back the curtain on why artists need to make their art. Plus it has a brilliant joke skewering the lack of asexual representation in media. A great read that I strongly recommend.
