Camp Damascus is the first (traditional) novel by Chuck Tingle.
Finished on: 6.6.2024

Content Note: (critical treatment of) conversion therapy, queermisia

Plot:
Rose lives in Neverton, Montana, a small town that is home to Camp Damascus, a camp run by her church aimed at queer kids. The astounding thing is that Camp Damascus has a 100% success rate in saving those queer kids from sin, that is make them straight. Rose herself is devout, but she starts to feel strange things for her best friend, a girl. And she starts to see a strange, demonic woman, and then she vomits up moths. Rose is disconcerted, to say the least, but she is also determined to find out what is actually happening.

Camp Damascus is an absolute page-turner of a book. Gobbled up in the shortest amount of time, it nevertheless touches on some deep political issues – an almost perfect combination.

Little is known about Tingle personally, but I am pretty sure that he has his own experience with queermisic evangelical churches. This book just feels so personal. In any case, there is an undercurrent of righteous rage at the cruelties committed in the name of doing good that gives the book its biggest drive.

But it’s not the only thing that propels the book forward: there is also a whole lot of hope, and warmth, and love, and joy to be found in the queer community that Rose finds in the course of events. And, finally, there is a good amount of horror and disgust that is used very effectively as well (the true horror, as usual, not lying in the demons themselves but in what people are prepared to do to each other). Though, fair warning, it is more on the YA side of horror than full-out adult one.

Rose is a great protagonist, and I loved the way that her being autistic is shown in the novel – in an off-handed, matter-of-fact way that comes with the author being autistic himself, I think, instead of using the autism for something, and be it to be more inclusive. Her romance was really cute, and the allies she finds along the way also caught my heart.

I could guess where things were headed in the showdown a good while earlier but that didn’t make that ending any less satisfying. Actually, the entire book is just a really good, satisfying reading experience.

Summarizing: exactly what I’d hoped for.