Fuck Your Tragedy: A Review of Chuck Tingle’s BURY YOUR GAYS
Review by Justine Norton-Kertson
Let me say this plainly: Bury Your Gays is a masterstroke of horror metafiction—sharp as a kitchen knife, heartfelt as a queer found family hug, and soaked in that signature Chuck Tingle sincerity that turns satire into sacred rage.
This is a novel that understands what it means to be a queer creator working in a world that too often demands your pain for profit. Our protagonist, Misha, a queer screenwriter, is told to kill off the gay characters in his long-running series to juice the algorithm. It’s not just a story beat—it's an act of violence cloaked as industry logic. Misha’s refusal sparks a brutal, surreal descent into a nightmarish Hollywood hellscape—one haunted not just by literal monsters, but by the ghosts of tropes we’ve been forced to relive again and again.
What elevates Bury Your Gays beyond clever critique is Tingle’s ability to make you feel the emotional weight of these choices. Yes, this book is smart as hell and dripping with genre-savvy brilliance (if you’ve ever yelled “Don’t go in there!” at a queer-coded character, you’ll find yourself seen here). But it’s also deeply, achingly sincere. Misha is haunted not just by slashers and wraiths, but by his own history, his trauma, his own half-closed closet door, and the endless loop of “representation” that ends in tragedy.
And the horror? It’s fucking delicious. Weird. Unrelenting. The hills above LA become a liminal battleground of queer resilience versus corporate violence, where monsters from Misha’s own past films crawl off the screen and start hunting him and his friends. These aren’t just metaphors—they’re embodiments of queer pain made monstrous by repetition. Think Scream meets Mulholland Drive by way of Get Out, but with a horny, horrifying, hilariously sincere Tingle twist.
What’s brilliant, though, is how Tingle takes the reader’s expectations—especially us jaded horror nerds who’ve seen too many queer characters fridged for plot—and flips them inside out. Without spoilers, I’ll say this: Bury Your Gays doesn't just subvert the trope. It burns it down, buries it in sacred ground, and plants wildflowers over the grave.
As a nonbinary horror author, I found myself gutted and galvanized. This book screams in the language of the silenced. It’s a love letter to queer horror fans who’ve had to watch our stories end in blood for the comfort of straight audiences. But more than that, it’s a battle cry. It reminds us that survival is resistance, and that our stories—messy, terrifying, beautiful—deserve to live.
Chuck Tingle has always been a literary trickster, a chaotic good force of queer weirdness. But with Bury Your Gays, he cements himself as one of the most vital horror authors working today. Not in spite of the absurdity. Because of it. Because horror, like queerness, holds contradictions: pain and joy, fear and love, death and defiance.
So go read Bury Your Gays. Seriously. Right now. Then scream about it. Then write your own damn story—one where we survive. One where we fucking win.
***
Highly recommended for fans of metafictional horror, queer media criticism, and the radical hope that comes from refusing to die quietly.
