Did I ever think I would be reading a serious horror book by Chuck Tingle? Absolutely not! But I am so glad I did.
Camp Damascus tells the tale of Rose Darling, a 20 year old woman who is happily living a very Christian life in her very Christian community. Everything seems idyllic until one day, her male best friend tries to kiss her. Shortly after, she throws up an astonishing amount of flies and her life takes a demonic spiral from there.
This book is a little different than the kind of horror I normally read, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed it. It has good queer rep (in my queer opinion), it has some really memorable characters and addresses an important modern issue through a horror lens (mainly, conversion camps). I was particularly impressed by how 'real' the characters felt. This book does a good job of capturing the complexity of having a shitty family whilst absolutely making no excuses for them.
My only issue with this book is it felt a little linear? Not every book has to have twists or surprises even, but it felt reasonably obvious what was going on quite early into the book and the story didn't evolve much from that point. I still enjoyed it a lot because of the characters but the horror aspect was lost to me due to the predictability, which was a bit of a shame.
Overall if you can handle the subject material, I would definitely give this book a try. It's definitely not a book that I will forget for a while, and I look forward to more serious work by this author given the standard of the character writing
Overall Rating:
.5
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