I felt absolutely nothing reading this. Every time I put it down I forgot I was reading it 😭. I’ve never read a book where every page is telling me instead of showing me what’s happening.

This is my second Chuck Tingle and I think I can confidently say that we don't vibe. The characters in this are flat, the plot overexplained and moralizing, and, perhaps most disappointingly, the horror is not scary.

Spoilers spoilers always spoilers.

I think there is a real disconnect in tone between different parts of the book where it seems like Tingle wants to write horror, including pretty graphic scenes of violence and body horror, but the way characters react to this violence robs it of any weight. We see a man brutally beaten, his tongue cut out, his fingers severed, and then a few pages later Misha, our main character, uses his friend's severed finger to open a biometric lock with about as much thought as you would give finding a key on the ground. His best friend and the cardboard cut-out of a man he calls his boyfriend have their minds obliterated (through a mechanism I don't totally understand despite the very comprehensive science fiction explanation) and the very next chapter he barely thinks about them at all. And to a certain extent, it makes sense that their pseudo-death doesn't affect Misha that much, because they're fine. He saves them. Practically no one of importance dies, except the aforementioned dismembered man, and we're not supposed to like him that much. The stakes feel nonexistent despite the ticking clock counting down to literally have all his bones removed. Don't worry about it.

The flashbacks to Misha's various queer traumas also kill a great deal of the horror because they take pains to explain everything that's happening, where the ideas for his monsters came from, and what they represent. After a harrowing encounter with the homophobic older brother of his childhood crush, Misha is forced to spend the night in a barn with a sad little lamb, and went on to create the Black Lamb, a cosmic monster in sheep's clothing—do you get it? The way little gay kids feel like a monster inside? The Smoker, already kind of lame, only becomes more so when you find out it's just his shitty uncle in monster make up.

When the book introduces the real monster—AI nanobots that can take the likeness and abilities of anything Warner Harold Brothers owns the rights to, including its employees—we are beaten about the head with why this is bad, in plain text, like we're too stupid to understand on our own. "You know who the real villain is?" I continue [...] "Unchecked capitalism and the desire for capitalist systems to monetize other people's trauma."

Okay. Well. Everybody go home, I guess.

The book talks endlessly about the monetization and oversaturation of queer tragedy in media, which was a huge and hugely relevant problem... about ten years ago. That's not to say it never happens now (and who's to say how things will go in the future in this political climate), but now that Hollywood has figured out we're a profitable demographic, I think we actually have a much bigger problem grappling with sanitized, watered-down, boring depictions of queerness. A mainstream LGBTQIA+ character is frequently not allowed to be flawed or messy or complicated or too unpalatably queer or interesting in any way. And, much to my surprise, the book acknowledges this! The enforced, conflict-free "queer joy" introduced near the end of the book could have been really interesting to explore, and I think could have been a great vein to mine for horror where the stories supposedly celebrating you don't have anything to do with you at all. But we spend less than one chapter with this idea before we have to go wrap up the stupid scifi bullshit and get this thing to the printers.

Horror just seems a profoundly weird vector by which to center queer joy in the first place. I would actually love to see more queer horror, queer tragedy, or queers behaving badly that are told by queer people because all our stories are valuable. The book's brief third act acknowledgement of this feels like a disclaimer to the milquetoast "representation matters" polemic that makes up the rest of the text.

I had similar problems with his debut, Camp Damascus. Overcomplicated, overexplained, and goofy. Utterly stripped of metaphor in a way that somehow makes the emotional truths of the issues they're trying to discuss more opaque. Lacking in vulnerability in a typically very vulnerable and visceral genre. Chuck has all the answers, so don't think too hard about it, and above all, don't be scared.