Chuck Tingle’s new book Lucky Day is terrific … and space raptor–free.

If you’ve heard of Chuck Tingle, it’s likely due to the wild titles of his extremely niche, parodic, self-published gay erotica, many of which have gone viral since Tingle became involved in the culture wars within the science-fiction community in the 2010s. And if that’s so, you may be surprised to learn that Tingle has, over the past few years, evolved into one of the better horror/technothriller authors around. The mainstream publishing success of the author of This Handsome Sentient Baseball Hits a Home Run Into My Butt is one of the most unlikely, inspiring, and downright sweet underdog stories in book publishing, an industry not known for its abundance of sweet underdogs.

Tingle’s first taste of mass-culture fame came in 2016, when one of his short stories was nominated for a Hugo Award. The Hugos, presented every year at the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon), are among the genre’s most prestigious prizes. Hugo winners are voted on by people attending or officially supporting the convention in the months leading up to the gathering. This democratic approach leaves the Hugo voting process susceptible to manipulation, notably, in the mid-2010s, by a group calling itself the Rabid Puppies, which objected to the awards increasingly going to women and people of color. In 2016 the Rabid Puppies succeeded, via bloc voting, in getting books by the group’s preferred writers on the Hugo ballot—and also secured a nomination for Tingle’s Space Raptor Butt Invasion, mainly as a joke meant to denigrate the Hugos’ moves toward diversity.

Space Raptor Butt Invasion is a relatively tame title, as Tingle’s go. His erotica—shortish stories he calls “Tinglers,” with covers Photoshopped by Tingle himself—was and remains celebrated for its titles. These include My Billionaire Triceratops Craves Gay Ass, Glazed by the Gay Living Donuts, Bigfoot Pirates Haunt My Balls, and the anatomical conundrum Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt. Dinosaurs, unicorns, and assorted inanimate objects that become “living” feature as love interests, and such fantastical elements as time travel (which somehow enables that recursive butt-pounding) abound. Tingle writes under a pseudonym and offers a biography studded with impossibilities, such as a birthplace in Home of Truth, Utah, a ghost town abandoned in 1977, and a degree in holistic massage from DeVry University, which offers no such credential. When appearing in public, he always wears sunglasses and a pink bag over his head with the words Love Is Real printed across the brow.

While some of the authors whose work got muscled onto the 2016 Hugos nominations by the Rabid Puppies withdrew their titles in protest, Tingle did not. Instead, he used the boost in his prominence to criticize Vox Day, the leader of the Puppies, as a “devil” and to further spread the core Tingle message, which he summarizes as “Love Is Real for All Who Kiss.” Tingle asked the indie game developer Zoë Quinn—prime target of Gamergate, a harassment campaign in which Day was instrumental—to accept the award for him should he win and snapped up the domain name therabidpuppies.com to promote an assortment of charities and authors reviled by the Puppies. He also published a Tingler titled Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination, one of many stories in which a Tingle narrator hooks up with a completely immaterial lover, such as an idea or symbol. (In this case, given that the Hugo Award itself is shaped like a phallic rocket ship, the cover art was a slam dunk.) As Tingle put it during an interview with the podcast produced by the romance website Smart Bitches, Trashy Books: “Anybody can prove love when you’re just walking down the street … but it’s even harder to prove love when the devil’s banging on your door. And that’s when it’s most important because then when you prove it and the whole world sees, it includes a wave of good days ahead, and that is important.”

Tingle’s wacky titles and often peculiar way of speaking can make him come across as a kind of horny naif, and this, along with his heartily accepting nature, made him a mascot of sorts for the very liberalizing forces that the Rabid Puppies tried to thwart. Tingle and a person claiming to be his son, Jon—who posted a (since deleted) AMA on Reddit—have asserted that Tingle is an “autistic savant” as well as schizophrenic. This explains, perhaps, Tingle’s distinctive diction and grammar both in person and online. As a champion for sexual minorities and the neurodivergent community, he found many fans, whom he has dubbed “buckaroos.” Tingle’s adventures in trolling the Rabid Puppies earned him profiles in the New York Times and Vox, among other mainstream news outlets. His public appearances, in which he scampers joyfully through ranks of adoring buckaroos, have made him genuinely beloved.

It wasn’t clear, however, whether the delight people took in Tingle’s persona and the titles of his Tinglers necessarily amounted to a real appreciation for the stories themselves. It wasn’t even clear how many buckaroos had actually even read them. True, the Tinglers often include a sprinkling of social and political commentary—so even if an animated ear of corn isn’t your idea of a dream date, you might, say, resonate with the commentary on agribusiness in Creamed in the Butt by My Handsome Living Corn. Still, there’s a limit to how much erotic fiction most readers can consume ironically.

Then, two years ago, Tingle published a novel, Camp Damascus, with Nightfire, the horror imprint of Tor Publishing Group. The book deal, reputedly the result of a tweet in which Tingle tagged Tor, marked the author’s first foray into traditional publishing. The prepublication reviews were glowing, and the blurbs came from such science-fiction luminaries as N.K. Jemisin and John Scalzi. In 2024 Tingle followed up with Bury Your Gays, praised as “even more gripping” than Camp Damascus by the New York Times, and an “instant USA Today bestseller,” according to his publisher. The audiobook features cameos by the esteemed SF and horror writers Charlie Jane Anders, T.J. Klune, and Stephen Graham Jones. It won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel. Now comes Lucky Day, a book best described as a probability thriller. It features an existentially depressed professor of statistics who joins in the federal investigation of a sinister Las Vegas casino. It’s the first of a four-book deal Tingle signed last year with Nightfire. Chuck Tingle has gone legit, heralded by trumpets of sincere and effusive praise.

By Chuck Tingle. Tor Nightfire.

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Perhaps the best way to understand Tingle’s career plot twist is as part of a trend in horror fiction that speaks to contemporary identity issues. The most celebrated of all of these works is Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out, in which Peele leveraged long-standing horror tropes (the seemingly idyllic community fueled by the consumption of outsiders, etc.) as metaphors for the predation of racism. Camp Damascus is narrated by Rose, a young woman raised in a cultlike Christian community, who suffers strange dreams and encounters with frightening demons as suppressed memories of her time in the titular gay conversion camp gradually return to her. In one of the funniest touches in the novel—Tingle retains his madcap sense of humor—the pale, stringy-haired demons come dressed in polo shirts and khakis, complete with name tags displaying their biblical monikers. Camp Damascus can occasionally be a bit unpolished, but Tingle’s pacing and command of narrative are spot on. “He has a real knack for dramatizing our current anxieties,” Jones told me, adding, “You can make a good point if you want to, but the first thing you’ve got to do is write well. He knows his way around a line, a scene, a character. I’m completely impressed.”

In Bury Your Gays—still my favorite of Tingle’s novels—the narrator, Misha, is a TV screenwriter with an exuberant asexual best friend and near-perfect boyfriend who gets called into the studio head’s office and ordered to change the storyline of his most successful series. The novel’s title comes from a hoary entertainment trope in which queer characters were depicted as inevitably tragic and doomed. Misha—who as a child was a fan of an X Files–like network show with two male lead characters who were obviously in love but never allowed to admit, let alone consummate, it—wants to demolish that convention by having the two female federal agents in his show finally, finally kiss. The first time I heard the expression “That would prove love is real” was from an X Files fan explaining to me why it was so important to her and other Scully/Mulder shippers that the pair finally get together romantically. So whatever the true facts of Tingle’s biography may be, I’m pretty sure he’s an X-Phile.

Bury Your Gays is a more sophisticated novel than Camp Damascus. When Misha refuses to write a script that invalidates his main characters’ queerness (or one that acknowledges it, then immediately kills them off), he finds himself stalked by what he at first believes are overzealous cosplaying fans of his other “gay-inflected” horror films and shows. Soon, however, he realizes that his tormenters are the characters themselves, although how and why they have been manifested and sent after him is the novel’s central mystery. The narrative is occasionally cut with flashbacks depicting the real-life experiences that inspired Misha’s fictional monsters, including a heart-wrenching story about an uncle who discovered Misha’s gayness. Another writer might be tempted to ratchet up the cruelty of this uncle to fantastical proportions, but the coldly selfish ways the older man blackmails his nephew have the sting of reality. The contrast between this mundanity and the more grotesque flights of Bury Your Gays only makes Misha’s backstory more affecting.

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Camp Damascus is set in Montana, where Misha grew up and where he is still not out of the closet to his mother and boyhood friends. According to his current author biography, Tingle moved from Billings to Los Angeles in recent years, a change that surely inspired the Hollywood setting of Bury Your Gays. Both Tingle and “Jon” have stressed that the Chuck Tingle persona is not a bit, but it’s hard to reconcile the eccentric voice of Tingle’s interviews and social media posts with the smooth, knowing tone of Bury Your Gays or, for that matter, the snappy dialogue of Lucky Day. But tempting as it is to fall down the rabbit hole of Chuck Tingle’s true identity, the books themselves have proved just as compelling.

In Tingle’s most recent novel, narrator Vera Norrie is celebrating the publication of her first book with her friends, girlfriend, and mother at a Chicago restaurant when the area is walloped by an LPE, or Low-Probability Event. This causes a cascade of freak accidents—Tingle can slather on the gore when he wants to—that ultimately cause 8 million deaths across the planet, including that of Vera’s mother. The incident plunges the reason-loving Vera into a profound depression, and when the story picks up again four years later, she’s holed up alone in her mom’s suburban house, surrounded by trash, living on ramen, and refusing to answer her phone. It takes an ebullient agent from the Low-Probability Event Commission to drag Vera out of her torpor, although she insists through much of the novel that “absolutely nothing matters. … It’s just tragedy, bullshit, and chaos.”

Vera and Layne, the LPEC agent, develop a classic bantering odd-couple rapport: “Can you stop seizing the day for just one fucking minute?” Vera snaps at one point. Their quarry is the party or parties responsible for a severe disruption in the distribution of luck, a rift causing such phenomena as a rain of breakfast cereal and multiple spontaneous human combustion cases in a single trailer park. But the despair Vera feels is a recurring theme in Tingle’s work; one of the monsters in Bury Your Gays is an alien being capable of instilling cosmic ennui with a touch of her hand. When Vera finally confronts the Big Bad of Lucky Day, it assures her that existence is “too many things spilling into one another to create a sickening, painful, exhausting soup called life. Reality is ridiculous, and the only thing that makes any sense is the nothingness.”

Vera’s bisexuality ostensibly feeds into this theme because people keep telling her that bisexuals don’t exist, but the stakes here feel a lot more vast than the lack of social validation for a marginalized sexual identity. Lucky Day leaves the impression that Chuck Tingle—whoever he may be—is a combination of Layne and Vera, one part joyous celebrator of love in all its diversity and one part gawper into the void. As the novel spins off into a dizzying crescendo of mind-bending improbabilities, it seems to be carrying its author with it, into parts and adventures unknown. Who can say what Chuck Tingle will do next? All we can be sure of is that it will be real.

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