Camp Damascus is a book I knew was going to be utterly terrifying from the moment I read the blurb and first sample chapter. The reason why? It’s about a conversion camp for gay kids with a one hundred percent success rate. The silent screaming the first chapter induced was enough to make me hesitate to read it. This would be because it seemed Camp Damascus would be one of the rare horror works that I actually found scary instead of gross. (Spoiler: It was both! It was actually scary, and actually very gross!)
Our Protagonist is a young autistic woman named Rose Darling. (Spoiler: as a theme, there are some shout-outs and references to Peter Pan worked in. I may or may not have some ideas on what the underpinning reasoning was.) She lives with her parents and belongs to a conservative Protestant denomination that runs a conversion camp for gay and lesbian kids. Rose absolutely believes in the “mission” of her church up until an outing with a friend that turns out to have been a date. (No she did not realize it was a date. Most of my terror early on was based on, “Oh no she’s asexual and her parents think she’s a lesbian so they’re going to send her to the camp and Bad Things Will Happen.” It was so much worse than that. So much worse.) Which Rose finds out after the fact when her parents ask her how her “date” went. This leads to some awkward, earnest conversation on the importance of making a family and getting married, and then some increasingly bizarre behavior from both of her parents.
This leads to Rose questioning just about everything about her current reality and perception of the same. She ends up discovering a great deal about herself, and also about what lies behind the conversion camp’s one hundred percent success rate. (It is something that’s extremely horrifying! I suspected or was clued in on what was going on fairly early but this did not take away from the tension or the sense of horror. Tingle works in some twists I hadn’t expected, and twists that just add to the sense of dread. The fridge horror was backed deep into that refrigerator. Lurking like soup you forgot about and is now a very strange color due to bacteria and mold.)
Camp Damascus has a lot of tension in the narrative. There were points where I very much had my teeth clenched from anxiety. There are some moments of unreality that mix in with the supernatural/fantasy/science fiction aspects of the plot, which heightened my dread at moments when Rose was being gaslit by her father and her therapist. (There is so much gaslighting. I had so much secondhand anxiety from the gaslighting. It was very effective from a narrative perspective, but there was just. So. Much. Gaslighting.) Chuck Tingle does a great job at building these tensions and increasing the moments of unreality as Rose discovers what’s going on behind what she’s experiencing.
And on top of that, he also manages to sneak in aspects of found family and acceptance into the work. This is occasionally strangely heartwarming. (I do love me some found family.) The mystery and thriller aspects of the story are interesting and engaging, and Rose’s journey to get to the bottom of the conspiracy she’s surrounded by is well-plotted with lots of interesting twists and turns.
This review is based on a galley received via NetGalley!
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