Camp Carnage by Elliot Arthur Cross & Joshua Winning

Formats - Print, Digital

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing

Genre: Killer/Slasher, Comedy Horror

Audience: Y/A

Takes Place in: Colorado, USA
Diversity: Gay and Lesbian characters

Content Warnings:  Body Shaming, Bullying, Child Abuse, Child Death, Death, Drug Use/Abuse, Forced Captivity, Gaslighting, Gore, Homophobia, Mental Illness, Racism, Sexism, Slurs, Suicide, Violence, Verbal/Emotional Abuse (Highlight to view)

Blurb:

In the summer of 1986, Billy Collins is sent to his own personal Hell – summer camp. The remote Camp Genesis offers desperate parents a place to “straighten” out their gay teenagers with the help of the puritanical Katherine Creevey. Besides the typical horsing around, campfire tales and summer games, the Genesis program forces gay and questioning teens into humiliating gender-based lessons. While Billy wants nothing more than to escape Camp Genesis, he can’t help worrying that something even more sinister is hiding just out of sight. Unknown to Billy, two campers were murdered three years ago. Just days after Billy and the new campers arrive, people start to go missing, and it’s up to Billy and his new friend Jem to find out what’s really going on. Is a maniac on the loose? Is history repeating itself? One thing’s for sure – at Camp Genesis, you have to fight to survive…

Eid Mubarak! I hope all my Muslim readers have a happy Eid Al-Fitr, and that Ramadan brought you peace and prosperity. In honor of the holiday my next review will feature a book from Salaam Reads a new publishing imprint that focuses on books for Muslim kids and young adults. For now, let's finish up pride month with a gay camp slasher story.

It's an unfortunate fact of life that the majority of self-published books are bad. Really, REALLY bad. Like, any movie remake with Matthew Broderick in it bad. I get that not all self-published books are mind-numbingly awful, and there are definitely benefits to self-publishing (better royalty rates and creative control) over the traditional model. But for every The Martian there are about a million crappy Dinosaur/Alien Romances with bad grammar and a cover that looks like someone tried to illustrate their bad LSD trip in MS Paint. So I was skeptical when I first picked up Camp Carnage and saw it was *gasp* self-published.



It's like J.J. Abram's and Rob Liefeld made cover art for some bad fanfic.

But it's actually pretty good! No poorly photoshopped cover, no obvious author self-inserts, the text has been edited for spelling and grammar, and the story is solid and enjoyable. There are still some issues, but overall it's a fun throwback to campy 80's horror classics, with a largely queer cast. The characters should be familiar to horror fans, there's the virginal hero, the hero's best friend, the mean rival, the love interest, the "cool" best friend, the stoner who acts as the comic relief, the brooding loner, the creepy caretaker, the sole black guy, and the fat kid (yeah... there's a lot of body-shaming in this book). But in this story, the virginal hero and promiscuous bully, usually female-only roles, are both gay men named Billy and Kyle, respectively. Meanwhile, the handsome, mysterious jock whose attention they're vying for is still in serious denial about his sexuality, while Billy's best friend is a bad ass lesbian and probably the toughest person in the camp.  Of course, not everyone sticks to their assigned "role". Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that literally anyone can die, so don't get too attached to anyone, and flipping the genders of the "virgin" and the "whore" isn't the only way Cross and Winning invert horror tropes.

No! Everyone gets one character trait, and that's it! Now go take your clothes off until you get stabbed.

The rest of the cast is pretty much just there to bring up the body count, so the authors didn't bother to give them much in the way of personalities. It would have been nice if they were slightly more rounded, or had more than one character trait, but honestly, they're just cannon fodder, so who really cares. Though it'd be great if the fat kid could have been characterized by something other than his weight (seriously, what is with all the fat shaming!?). I get that many of the characters are stereotypes, but c'mon. Everyone else got to have an actual personality trait as their one defining characteristic, as opposed to a physical attribute! At least the sole black guy got to be the flaming kid, as opposed to a racist caricature.

As far as killers go, the murderer isn't very creative, though they do manage to bump off the majority of the cast without anyone noticing.  Like, to the point where no one finds a dead body until the last few chapters. I'd hope someone in charge would be at least a little more concerned by a number of strange disappearances, but nope. Did people just not give a shit about their children back then? Were teens sent off into the wilderness en masse, and everyone just hoped some of them would make it out alive? I know adults were more laid back about unsupervised kids in the 80's, but you'd think a child that went missing in the woods for days would at least warrant a phone call.

I mean, it's not like he got murdered in the woods by the camp serial killer. Probably... 

Now, obviously you don't want the victims to figure out they're being picked off too early in the story. There needs to be time to draw out the suspense, and let the reader get to know the soon-to-be corpses a little better. But let's face it, if you're reading slasher horror it's because you want to see the bodies hit the floor. Any time spent on character development and plot is just making sure you have a nutritious meal before gorging on cake and ice cream. Yeah it's important, but it's not the good stuff. And Cross and Winning just waste too much time on boring camp activities when they could've been writing about terrified campers trying to escape the killer. Besides, most of the characters are so flat and boring I really don't want to spend any length of time with them, I just want to see them get murdered in the most gruesome, over-the-top way imaginable.

The camp itself is a lot less horrible than I expected a pray-away-the-gay camp to be. Then again, if it were anything like the places you read about on the news, it would be a completely different kind of horror story, and a masked murderer would seem silly and unnecessary in comparison. That's not to say there wasn't some pretty disturbing homophobia from the adults trying to "convert" their poor charges. They're not being electrocuted, beaten, or medically tortured (big trigger warning for those links by the way), but being told who you are is wrong and unnatural is still really damaging. One scene, where one of the camp counselors, Father Norton, has the campers repeat homophobic insults they've received and direct them at Kyle, was really upsetting. It was an incredibly dark moment in an otherwise goofy horror story, and much more disturbing than a silly, fictional slasher. I had to go hug my wife after reading that part. But, over all, Camp Carnage is still a fun homage to 80's Slasher films, with plenty of nods to nerd culture, gore, and humor.