Camp Damascus Commentary
SPOILERS AHEAD
“This predisposition for deep analysis might also explain why we seem to be the only ones who’ve managed to remember our time at Camp Damascus, albeit faintly. We haven’t been blessed by some incredible superpower from the great beyond, we’re just curious. Sometimes that’s all it takes.”
Chuck Tingle’s Camp Damascus is a thrilling coming-of-age horror story set in rural Montana in a deeply religious community called Kingdom of Pine, which owns and operates the most successful gay conversion camp in the country, Camp Damascus. Rose, our 20 year old protagonist, lives with her parents and is devout in her faith, until a strange encounter with an unknown young woman who seems familiar. Questions as well as repressed memories begin surfacing for Rose, as well as realizations about her own sexuality. She must untangle a web of deceit to fully remember what happened to her at Camp Damascus. But it’s not just her family and community Rose begins to fear; a demon is following her, too. But like many beloved horror protagonists, she is a fighter. Along with her friends, Rose must find out what’s really going on at Camp Damascus, or else suffer an agonizing fate at the hands of a demon.
The title is a bit deceiving, as the majority of the story takes place in the wake of Rose’s time at Camp Damascus. Rose doesn’t remember anything at first, glimpsing odd little fragments of the story here and there, and a lot of the story is us sleuthing with Rose to figure out the missing pieces. Initially, we and Rose don’t even know she was at the camp at all.
What we do know is that a demon is there as an enforcer of Camp Damascus’s purpose: anytime she so much as thinks about another woman— especially the mysterious woman Rose keeps bumping into— the demon penalizes her— violently. As Rose pieces together how the demon works, and that her parents are lying to her, as is her therapist, reality shifts into focus and it all starts to make sense.
Happily, I’ll tell you that the book gets scary almost immediately. Within the first 10 pages, I was creeped out. Engrossing and nightmarish, Tingle’s novel doesn’t beat around the bush and gets you hooked in record time. The scares Tingle turns to are familiar, yet strikingly grotesque and terrifying. You can expect certain things with a demon story, and Tingle twists them around to interrogate brainwashing, the nature of cults, and religion.