Camp Damascus is a 2023 horror novel written by Chuck Tingle. It’s published by Tor’s Nightfire imprint and marks Tingle’s debut into mainstream publishing.
Neverton, Montana is home to the Kingdom of the Pines, a Christian sect whose claim to fame is their conversion therapy program, Camp Damascus, which claims to have a “100% success rate”. When devoted follower Rose Darling starts seeing demonic apparitions whenever she feels attraction towards women, her faith is tested as she soon learns the secret to the camp’s success rate is less than holy.
Camp Damascus provides examples of:
- Cure Your Gays: The titular camp specializes in this, claiming to have a “100% success rate” which turns out to involve tethering an actual demon to each of their campers who will attack either them or whoever they’re experiencing attraction to, as well as wiping any memories of past same-sex relationships.
- Forced into Evil: The demons don't actually want to be following gay teens around torturing them into being straight. They're forced to by their collars, and the second they're free they take very violent exception to what they've been made to do.
- Forgotten First Meeting: A one-sided example. Rose and Willow had a relationship prior to Rose being sent to the camp. When she encounters Willow again, she tries talking to her, but Willow is too heartbroken seeing her girlfriend not remember what they had.
- Hollywood Atheist: Rose starts to veer into this mindset halfway through the novel after fully breaking off from Kingdom of the Pines and exploring her forgotten sexuality as well as her interest in science, rejecting the concept of religion and seeing it as a tool of hatred. Deconstructed when she reconnects with Saul, who still believes in God even after everything the camp and the Pines put them through. While Rose doesn’t fully understand this, she respects him and appreciates their differences in perspective as part of their friendship.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: Rose realizes her therapist is in on it when he refers to Pachid as "she". Despite Pachid taking the form of a woman when she stalks Rose, in all the texts that describe demons, Pachid is solely referred to as male. The only reason he'd use female pronouns, therefore, is if he's seen this version of Pachid for himself.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Rose has this revelation after realizing the gravity of Kingdom of the Pines’ bigotry, noting that she herself had helped perpetuate it in her time there.
- Our Demons Are Different: Pachid is described as a humanoid figure with long, stringy dark hair and wearing a red polo shirt with a name tag on it. The other demons are described similarly, with the same shirts and name tags.
