In Bury Your Gays, a chilling social horror novel by Chuck Tingle (Camp Damascus; Straight), a screenwriter whose Oscar nomination has placed him on the verge of major success now faces an ultimatum from the studio to kill off the lesbian characters in his streaming series.
As a kid, Misha never saw characters who were gay like him on television. Hints at same-sex pairings were abandoned in favor of straight love interests, or gay characters died. Now executives are asking Misha to do the same thing on the advice of "the algorithm." When he resists, characters he created for horror movies start stalking him, his boyfriend, Zeke, and his friend Tara. Misha's movies reveal his childhood emotional scars, so he must now literally conquer his demons. But he already had so much to grapple with before the monsters appeared; he's out in his personal life, but not publicly, nor to those who know him from his youth.
Tingle expertly interweaves Misha's struggles with a bitingly satirical horror plot that could not be a more timely commentary on the use of AI in film and television production, which is rendered all the more effective with a twist when it seems like Misha has won. He tops it all off with a truly chilling collection of movie monsters and some asexual representation--rare even in queer media--in the form of Tara. Whether he's working in horror or absurdist erotica, Tingle remains delightfully original in a way no algorithm could duplicate. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library