I had to wait until I was in a good headspace to handle this. Ruth, an autistic devout Christian on the cusp of adulthood, begins to realize everything in her life is not as it seems, not even herself. Cue the horror of religious trauma and conversion therapy camps, right at home with the traditional trappings of the horror genre. It gets genuinely creepy as hell as all hell is unleashed, quite literally in the case of demons run amok. (I could see where some readers would take issue that Chuck chose to make the demons real, and hell real, but that worked for me in the context of this book. Especially with the revelation of who the real monsters are, and that the demons are unwilling accomplices, ready to turn on their masters for what they’ve been forced to do.)
I wish I didn’t have such a long list of conversion therapy survival books,1 but this is a worthy addition. It’s the flavor of extreme and homophobic evangelicalism that I grew up in, with all the trauma that accompanies it. And of course it’s Chuck Tingle, so we get the happy ending. LOVE IS REAL.
This site is too new to have all of them added, but off the top of my head, Nick White, The King by Tiffany Reisz, and the memoir Boy Erased. ↩︎