Religious trauma, bugs, and demons in Camp Damascus

 

Today I’m talking about Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle. I actually bought this book when I went to Gay’s the Word the time that I bought Legend of the White Snake. This is one of those books where I’d never heard of it, but I picked it up because the cover looked cool, that’s it.

The blurb says that love is real. Demons are real. Kill the demons. Camp Damascus, nested in the Montana wilderness, is the world’s most effective gay conversion camp. Parents send their children from around the world to experience the program’s 100% success rate. But this story isn’t about that. This is about Rose Darling, a God-fearing young lady who can’t stop puking up flies. It’s about her parents who ignore her visions of an eerie woman with sagging, pale skin who watches from the woods. It’s about the desires deep inside Rose that don’t seem to make any sense, and her waking nightmares that are beginning to feel more like memories. And maybe, just maybe, it’s a little bit about Camp Damascus after all.

With that very last sentence of the blurb, part of me did immediately think that maybe there aren’t demons after all, and since it “a little bit about Camp Damascus”, that would probably end up being the camp’s method in conversion, and perhaps all she’s seeing and experience is just due to the camp, especially if Rose was God-fearing.

In the first chapter, Rose is talking with this girl, Martina, and sort of hoping that she’ll be able to create a deep, meaningful friendship that she’s been hoping for. You see she’s God-fearing from the get-go. Martina makes an offhand comment about Rose’s parents being crazy, and Rose, trying to make a friend, agrees, then immediately feels guilty for agreeing. She’s at this swimming hole with a bunch of kids from her school, where she jumps off a cliff with this boy Isaiah, that I got the vibe was into her. When he kisses her, she physically recoils, and when she gets home, her parents ask how her date was? Since I guess they tried to set her up with him. And at the end of the night, she just straight up vomits flies into her spaghetti and ends up seeing the form of a woman in her house after she watches this advert for Camp Damascus over her mum’s shoulder on TV and thinks to herself that at least she’s not gay, after having intrusive thoughts and feelings over Martina.

Like I mentioned a couple of paragraphs up, I presumed everything was going to be all down to Rose’s religious fear and then her guilt over these feelings she has for Martina and not wanting to be gay. But obviously she vomits flies, which her parents see, and then she also sees this demon – that I presumed was just going to be some kind of figment caused by the things just mentioned. But the first one doesn’t end up being the only one she sees, either.

I’m not a person who has read much around religious trauma, so seeing the relationship between religion and sexuality being portrayed in a way with demons was really interesting, because I presumed that the book was meaning that a person’s deviation from heterosexuality was meant to be “their demon”. But then you get to the later points of the books where you get a pretty major reveal to the route the book decides to take that I’ll say went absolutely insane. I don’t mind talking about spoilers since this book has been out for like a year or so I think. But it turns out, actual demons in this book. The demons that Rose ends up seeing? No, they’re just actual demons. I won’t say how they pertain to the religion part of the book, but this book does end up taking, I suppose, a supernatural twist.

Going back to the religious trauma bit, I thought it was so odd that Rose referred to her parents by their first names, Luke and Lisa. Part of me ended up thinking or wondering whether that was something that Americans do, but then when I used my brain for half a second it was obvious what the reason was – or at least my interpretation was. For me, even though Rose called them “mom” and “dad” to their faces, she used their names when narrating as a way that there’s some kind of disconnect between her and them. Given that they were so heavily religious and traditional in value, it was clear that Rose didn’t feel the same as them, especially when she so obviously fights with the concept of same-sex attraction while being in the church.

I definitely felt like this book jumped around, timeline-wise. And when I say that, I mean it in the sense that I wasn’t entirely sure where we were, timeline-wise, all the time. A good example I have comes when Rose eventually runs away from home, and then just no one ends up looking for her and there’s very little thinking of home. I was a little taken out by that, because when she does leave, I understand why her mum never came after her, as her mum was there when she left in the first place, basically telling her to go before her dad sees her. But I don’t know why, since her dad was clearly waiting for her, her dad never came looking for her – I feel like it would have made sense in the context of the book, and the fact that he didn’t just left me feeling like I was missing something. There was this obvious opportunity for conflict that just wasn’t utilised.

Speaking of missing something, I definitely felt like this book could have benefitted from an extra chunk of content – especially for the second half. I will also mention now, this paragraph will have explicit spoilers. So, like I mentioned prior, demons are real in this book, and Camp Damascus’s method of conversion was to tether real demons to queer people to prevent them from acting on their homosexuality, as in they would literally be scared straight. But in this second half of the book, Rose ends up running away and ganging up with Saul, one of the counsellors from Damascus, and Willow, a girl she used love before having her demon attached. And some of the stuff they did was gaggy, but I felt like I needed so much more. Rose, Willow, and Saul break into Camp Damascus and make their way into this underground facility where there’s the tethering machine and the whole goal is to just break the machine. But in the facility, there’s just so much more that was never explored.

I can understand why there’s limited content from the facility, because Rose’s goal was just to destroy the machine to prevent more people from having demons tethered to them, but the content that could have been drawn out from the facility is insane. And the thing is, I can’t tell if it’s a me issue or not. Because since she wants to destroy this machine, I felt like I missed the part where she ended up finding the strength and drive to break into an underground facility after just being a normal girl with a demon attached to her.

Overall, this was a good book, and at no point did I want to stop reading, but I just felt that, especially in the second half, there were just missed opportunities that could have been resolved by just having more content in the book.

Okay, bye!