Camp Damascus

Chuck Tingle
Completed 6/20/2025 Reviewed 6/20/2025
5 Stars

I picked up this book as a break between all the Hugo nominees I’m reading.  I loved his Bury Your Gays, and this one is just as amazing.  This book is another horror piece, this time with events surrounding a fundamentalist gay conversion camp.  It’s a powerful piece.  It’s not perfect, but it is so emotionally powerful and poignant that I couldn’t help but be intensely enthralled and moved by it.  It spoke to my experience being gay and Catholic, although the experience I had when I was active in the Church was unusually welcoming and supportive.  That is, until some of my friends turned evangelical.  Fortunately, some of them have learned a lot more about theology and context and we have mended those relationships.  So yes, this was a personally profound book.  Also, it was nominated for a 2023 Bram Stoker award.

Rose is a superiorly devout Christian twenty-year-old in the Kingdom in the Pines denomination in backwoods Montana.  However, she suddenly starts seeing a demon following her around.  It appears whenever she thinks about a friend of hers.  Rose doesn’t have much patient with boys, preferring the company of her female friend.  At a party, the demon appears and brutally murders her friend.  This throttles her, needless to say.  Then she comes across a young woman who screams at her to stay away and that she loves her.  Then she is followed by another demon who was following that woman.  She crashes her car trying to escape it and starts putting two and two together that one, she is gay, and two, demons are tethered to the young gay people in town.  Then she realizes she had been sent to Camp Damascus for gay conversion therapy and her memory of it has been suppressed.  She runs away from home, meets up with another exile, and tries to find a way to break the tether and destroy the camp.

The story is told from Rose’s POV.  She’s unbelievably devout, with the support of her parents and the Church’s therapist.  Then when her world turns upside down, the transformation she goes through is profound and intense.  Rose is also on the autism spectrum.  I was very impressed with how this was portrayed and have heard from other readers on the spectrum that it was very relatable to their experience.  The combination of her being gay and on the spectrum made for quite a multidimensional character.  At first, she’s kind of a Mary Sue, but soon she has a lot of cracks in her composure that break that characterization.

The other characters were also well developed.  Her parents were too nice until their composure cracked.  Her mother was clearly struggling with her religion and her love for Rose.  The therapist was devious, but believable.  And thank goodness for the exile and her girlfriend.  She comes to the conclusion that most of us have, that sometimes, you have to create your own family when the biological one won’t accept you for who you are.  

The horror in the book is quite scary and effective.  I had chills running through me through the first half.  But the real horror is that people can perpetrate evil upon others in the name of God. And it’s so visceral, especially at this time in history when this is happening all around us and is government sanctioned.  This book is timely, honest, and effective.  And with the excellent writing and character development, it is a must read for everyone.  I give this book five stars out of five.