comedy | Diversity in Horror Fiction

Camp Carnage by Elliot Arthur Cross & Joshua Winning

Formats: Print, digital

Publisher: CreateSpace Independent Publishing

Genre: Killer/Slasher, Comedy Horror

Audience: Y/A

Diversity: Gay and Lesbian characters

Takes Place in: Colorado, USA

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): 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

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.

An ugly book cover with the title “Bad cover Art. Book One: How Do Spines Even Work.” None of the fonts match, there’s a medieval painting of a skeleton with blurred edges, a big-eyed cat with wings, and a poorly drawn, anatomically incorrect woman holding a sword. Her hair is in a long ponytail and she’s wearing a revealing, dominatrix-like black outfit that seems to be glued on to her body. Her spine is twisted so both her breasts and butt are facing forward, and have lens flares on them.

It’s like J.J. Abrams 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.

An athletic boy wearing a “Slut” T-shirt looks at his shirt and asks “Shouldn’t there be more to my character than just the ‘slut’?” A scrawny boy wearing a “Virgin” shirt confirms “Yeah, that’s pretty offensive.” A buff girl with a punk haircut and a “Nerd” shirt responds “Sorry, but we’ve been dealing with this crap for years, now it’s your turn.” A blond girl with a “Jock” T-shirt grins behind her friend.

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.

A mom with very curly hair and 80’s makeup and clothing is saying “I’m just a little concerned that no one’s seen or heard from my son in over a week.” A conservatively dressed woman with her hair in a tight bun, and an older man in a plaid shirt are giggling at her. The conservative woman whispers to the man “Heh, check out helicopter mom over here.”

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.

Tags: Book Review, Gay, Horror Comedy, Killer/Slasher, Lesbian, LGBTQIA, Own Voices, Recommended, Young Adult

Cacy & Kiara and the Curse of the Ki’i by Roy Chang

Formats: Print

Publisher: Beach House

Genre: Ghosts/Haunting, Thriller, Comedy, Myths and Folklore

Audience: Children

Diversity: Asian American characters, Hapa characters, Native Hawaiian characters, Pacific Islander characters, Korean American Characters

Takes Place in: Hawai’i, USA

Content Warnings (Highlight to view): Verbal/Emotional Abuse, Bullying, Animal Death, Child Endangerment, Violence, Death

Blurb

Cacy and Kiara are sixth grade cousins who couldn’t be more different from each other. When their two schools take the same field trip to Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, Cacy and Kiara are thrown into an adventure filled with mystery and murder.

In order to save the park–and themselves–from certain destruction, they call upon their family ‘aumäkua (personal gods), receive guidance from the Goddesses Hi‘iaka and Pele, and befriend the inhabitants of a secret Menehune village.

Throughout their adventure, they learn the power of their connection to ancient Hawai‘i and the importance of working together.

Over sixty manga-style illustrations accompany the story adding another layer of action to an already action-packed tale.

Happy Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month! With the recent popularity of Pokemon Sun and Moon, and Disney’s Moana, I figured I’d cover a Polynesian book this time. Luckily, I recently visited the big island of Hawaiʻi* with my wife (we were on our honeymoon, and as a newlywed I have to mention my marriage approximately 50,000 times) and made a stop at Basically Books while in downtown Hilo, because no honeymoon is complete without picking up a few scary stories at the local bookstore!

Of course I had to get something by Glen Grant and Rick Carroll, two of Hawaii’s most prominent horror authors, but I also picked up a children’s chapter book by a local comic artist, Roy Chang, entitled Cacy & Kiara and the Curse of the Ki’i. Although it’s much more of a crime thriller than straight horror, (though it does have its moments, like the ghostly hitchhiker *shudder*), I enjoyed it enough that I wanted to include it on the site. The story stars two 11-year-old cousins, the brave and brash Cacy, and the intelligent, yet aloof Kiara, who stumble upon a crime in progress and accidentally release the curse of a long forgotten idol. Now they’re in a race against time to undo the curse before Pele destroys the island in her anger. Oh, and they’re being chased by an international crime syndicate who wants the idol for themselves, just in case you thought things were too easy. Luckily the girls are aided on their adventure by the Menehune, ʻaumākua, and other figures from Hawaiian mythology.

When I first started reading Chang’s book, I thought it was self published. The entire thing was riddled with run-on sentences, awkward phrasing, grammatical errors, and even a few typos. But nope! Cacy & Kiara went through an actual publishing house, which means, presumably, there was some sort of a professional editing process. Though, in this case, “professional editing process” most likely means that they waited until the last minute, panicked, and decided to just run the manuscript through spell check. That, or someone accidentally hired a walrus in a hat and made them an editor. Granted, Beach House is a small publisher, but you’d think that would mean their projects would get more attention and care, not less.

A walrus, wearing a hat, is sitting at a desk with a mug that says “#1 EDTOR” with backwards letters. In front of the walrus two people are arguing. A man in a suit is scolding a Hawaiian woman “How dare you question Mr. Odobenus? He’s been with this company for years! The woman has her arms throw out in frustration and yells back “But sir, Mr. Odobenus doesn’t know the difference between simple past tense and present perfect tense, and he’s constantly forgetting to add commas! Plus, he’s a freaking walrus!”

Yeah, I’m going with the Walrus theory.

Poor editing aside, the book isn’t bad. It’s creative, humorous, and I love the concept behind it. But Chang is clearly a much better artist than author, used to telling his stories through images rather than words. His art is so full of energy and expression that it does a much better job at capturing his creative ideas than the long, awkward, blocks of text he writes. In all honestly, I’d love to see the story done as a graphic novel because the ideas behind it are solid, the action scenes captivating, and the characters of Cacy and Kiara are bursting with energy and life. It’d be interesting to compare his Steampunk comic book series, Highball and Pepe, with Cacy & Kiara and see which one does a better job at telling the story. But, Chang, for the love of all that is holy, please erase your pencil lines! It just makes the art look messy and unfinished. Maybe the editor just published the rough draft instead of waiting for the final product? Because his other artwork doesn’t seem to suffer from the same problem.

A picture of Mr. Odobenus, the walrus wearing a hat. He has a goofy grin on his face and is blowing a raspberry.

I think we all know who to blame here.

But, when I finally put down my red pen and stopped nitpicking, I really enjoyed the book. About halfway through I got caught up in the action and suspense, and the novel really hit its stride. It made me think of the awesome cartoons from the 80’s – sure the writing was absurd and hackneyed, and the animation was full of errors, but we didn’t care! The action, fun characters, and creativity is what made us love them, and what made such an impression on us as kids. I can just picture Cacy and Kiara teaming up with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or piloting a nēnē goose mecha. Honestly, the book is intended for kids, and most kids are not going to care about Oxford commas or the flow of dialogue when Kiara’s flying a giant owl and Cacy is trapped in a truck that’s about to explode.

A picture of the two characters from the story, Cacy and Kiara. Cacy, a husky girl with pigtails and a wide grin, is wearing a shirt and jeans, with a pink backpack and a bat swung over her shoulder. Next to Cacy is her slightly taller, slender, bespectacled cousin, Kiara. Kiara’s hair is cut in a bob, and she’s wearing a blue school uniform. Her arms are crossed and she’s holding a strange, remote-control-looking device.

I would so watch this cartoon.

Even better, Chang has made the story educational without being preachy, unlike some of our childhood favorites (looking at you Captain Planet). This would be an awesome book to hand to a kid before a visit to Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, because learning about Hawaiian myths and ecology is a lot more fun when it involves high speed chases and international crime syndicates. There’s even a glossary of terms in the back (though I question why eruption was included but musubi wasn’t). Anyone familiar with the Big Island will be delighted to see references to popular locations such as Ken’s House of Pancakes, the Thurston Lava Tube, the Volcano House, and Pu`uhonua O Hōnaunau (all places I got to visit during my honeymoon). So, if you want to read an awesome adventure story about two spunky, tween girls, while learning about the big island of Hawai’i (and you’re not a huge grammarian) I would definitely recommend this book.

*At the time of writing this I didn’t realize how much tourism is hurting Hawaii, even before Covid and the water shortage, and how most Native Hawaiians don’t want people visiting their illegally occupied land.