Camp Damascus (Chuck Tingle)

Camp Damascus
Chuck Tingle
Tor Nightfire
Fiction, Fantasy/Horror
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Like many people in Neverton, Montana, Rose Darling is a proud, God-fearing disciple of the Kingdom of the Pine church, a once-humble sect that has risen to great renown through its outreach programs and megachurch. Like many of her peers, she has even helped fundraise for their special summer camp, Camp Damascus, a place where misguided youth are led, through the glory and the fear of Christ, to reject foul secular temptations and unnatural lusts and learn to "love right". Their notoriously high success rate has concerned Godly parents from around the world sending their kids and teens to the secluded campground, but just what happens there is never made clear; even those who have been there don't seem to have much to say about it. But asking questions implies an unhealthy curiosity, which is little more than a lack of faith. For all the many questions that Rose has about the world, even she would never think to ask about the miracles performed at Camp Damascus, not when those miracles save so many wayward souls.
The day she sees the stranger at the swimming hole - a ghastly, pale figure that nobody else seems to see - is the day everything changes... especially when, just after her best friend Isaiah tries to kiss her, Rose finds herself coughing up flies onto the family dinner table.
Rose has been having odd feelings for a while, fragments of memories that don't seem to fit with her orderly life and uncomfortable emotions around certain girls in her high school, but she tries to ignore them. Now, as more unexplained and terrifying things start happening around her, she slowly realizes that it's not just part of growing up, or all in her head, or ordinary temptations that plague the faithful. Something far darker and more dangerous is going on in Neverton, and all threads lead to the secrets hidden at Camp Damascus.

REVIEW: I first heard of Chuck Tingle a while ago, but the books he wrote didn't seem like my kind of thing. More recently, he seems to be moving into territory I find more interesting, so I figured this one was worth a shot when I found it available via Libby. Given my middling-to-low expectations going in, I found it surprisingly enjoyable, a dark tale of twisted faith and warped religion and the evil wrought by zealots thinking to forge love and God in their own images.
The sense of foreboding starts early on, as Rose struggles to fit in with her peers at the swimming hole and experiences her first vision of the pale, inhuman stranger in the woods. On the autism spectrum, her difficulty connecting to others is exacerbated by her fundamentalist upbringing; even in a churchgoing town, the children of the Kingdom of the Pines worshipers are a breed apart, complicit in their own isolation by a sense of unspoken moral superiority (though they themselves don't see it that way, just that other kids should embrace the love of Christ and reject corrupting secular influences). For Rose, scripture and the church also help ground her when she finds life or other teens confounding. When she later completely misreads her friend Isaiah's social cues, the reader already has a sense that it's more than just social awkwardness, given her visceral reaction to classmate Martina... but it's shortly thereafter, when she first coughs up a living fly, that both Rose and the reader realize just how terrifying the secrets beneath Neverton truly are - and the unusual reactions of her loving parents further show just how few people the young woman can trust to figure things out.
All along the way, she's told by her community and mentors and her own family to stop investigating, stop poking, stop indulging the sin of curiosity and obsession, but it's not in Rose's nature to let a question go, and once she starts picking at threads she has to follow where they lead, even if that direction runs counter to everything she's been taught to embrace. In the process, she learns just how her beliefs have been turned into blinders, how blind faith can be twisted by those with ulterior motives, and how much of what she was taught runs counter to the truth, even the truth within the very Bible she has essentially memorized. Does that mean her entire faith was misplaced? Not necessarily; she finds that the matter of belief, just like the matter of love, is far more complex and nuanced than she was raised to understand. She finds scant few allies and many enemies, and sometimes stumbles or backslides in her pursuit, but never gives up, especially not once the shape and scope of the evil before her becomes more evident, how many others have been hurt.
There are times when Tingle feels like he's hitting nails a little hard on their heads as he drives in certain points, but the palpable rage underneath the story is entirely justified... and all the more terrifying as one sees parallels in action in the real world, some of them being promoted to the national stage. Other parts seem to revel in gruesome imagery. On the whole, it's a solidly chilling story.

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