A review by minervacerridwen
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle

dark medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated

2.5

Even though I wanted to like the queer autistic main character, something about the writing made it very hard to connect with this book. It's written in first person and throws in cliché sentences in odd places, making me wonder if this was done on purpose or simply escaped an extra round of editing. The pacing of the story left me with the same question. In the first half it was interesting to see the evolution in the main character from someone extremely faithful to her religion and everything she'd learned, into a critical thinker who is trying to find her place away from the cult, but there was a large chunk after that where I lost interest. The story picked up right at the end and there were some cool concepts, but overall the distance from the main character and the general feel made it so Camp Damascus wasn't the right book for me.

Something that bothered me was that while Rose explicitly considered that these "demons" were creatures from a different universe, she never had a moment's compassion for them. Only at the end did it turn out that they only attacked queer people because they were made to, and that they'd much rather torture the oppressors instead. It felt like a dissonant that she realised they might also "just be animals" but that she didn't even try reasoning with them before finding ways to kill them, at a point where I don't think she'd had the vision of them torturing people in hell (?) yet. But then she still allows them to be on the loose at the end. I think it would have been in character for her to give the question of "what if someone or something is used for evil and needs to be stopped for that evil to stop, while at the same time it's also just some creature" more thought. Especially within the context of people being tortured just for being different.


For a long time I wondered whether the Peter Pan reference right at the beginning would become important, and while it was small, I was very glad to see the image of Rose's shadow engulfing the city at the very end. That was a nice touch.
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