In one regular segment of John Mulaney’s Netflix talkshow Everybody’s Live, the comedian and his guests take audience calls about the topic of the week. On the dinosaur-themed week, as well as an overwhelmed small boy and a legendary paleontologist, one caller announces himself as Chuck, an author of – among many other things – dinosaur erotica. “I think my most famous and award-winning [book] would be Space Raptor Butt Invasion,” he explains politely. “It was nominated for a Hugo award.”
One of Mulaney’s guests, actor Ayo Edebiri, asks if he’d won. “I didn’t win, but then I wrote a book called Pounded By My Hugo Award Loss, because you can write erotica about just about anything,” Chuck replies.
Edebiri and the other guest, Conan O’Brien, react with increasing delight and bemused glee, but the call soon ends without Mulaney fully exploring the comedic potential of his interlocutor.
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A chunk of Mulaney’s fanbase – which leans young, queer, and extremely online – rushed to the comments to let him know he’d missed a trick. That wasn’t just any old internet weirdo – this was an elite-tier internet weirdo known pseudonymously as Chuck Tingle. Originally going mildly viral for extremely specific self-published erotica with charmingly janky Photoshopped covers and titles like Pounded In The Butt By The Handsome Velociraptor, Tingle became a flashpoint in a deeply stupid – and politically ominous – culture war over the Hugo awards waged by a fringe far-right group.
I followed Tingle for years on what used to be Twitter as he posted cover after cover of increasingly convoluted titles, expanding from mythical beasts (Open Wide For The Handsome Sabertooth Dentist Who Is Also A Ghost) to abstract concepts (Turned Gay By The Existential Dread That I May Actually Be A Character In A Chuck Tingle Book), topical commentary (I Freed This Handsome Cargo Ship From The Suez Canal And Now He’s Stuck In My Butt), and even recursive metatextual orgies (Pounded In The Butt By My Book “Pounded In The Butt By My Own Butt”, which is just the second of at least six such conceptually stratified offerings).
If these titles seem underthought, I urge you to scan the relevant section of your preferred ebook storefront for a reminder that romance and erotica are in many ways wonderfully utilitarian genres that not only do exactly what they say on the tin but also say what they do on the tin.
enjoy brand new tingler POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY MY BOOK POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY MY BOOK POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY MY BOOK POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY MY BOOK POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY MY BOOK POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY MY BOOK POUNDED IN THE BUTT BY MY OWN BUTT out now https://t.co/PbPUFzGbgo pic.twitter.com/jpbE1MNVAD
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) February 22, 2019
Now, Tingle’s gone legit, publishing a novella, Straight, and three mainstream horror novels in as many years: Camp Damascus, Bury Your Gays and last month’s bestselling Lucky Day, a subtly post-Covid gorefest about collective and individual trauma, bisexual erasure and probability.
He’s also started appearing in person at fan events and conventions. Like fellow pseudonymous author Elena Ferrante (if her fanbase were primarily queer indie horror video game devs [non-derogatory]), he maintains his anonymity. Unlike Elena Ferrante, he does so by rocking up in person with a pink pillowcase or sack on his head, black Wayfarers covering his eyes and “LOVE IS REAL” scrawled across his visage. He wears loud blazers, sequined shorts, band tees and sometimes light-up sneakers, running into theatres and bookstores pumping his fists.
Online and in person, Tingle celebrates his audiences and his work with a guileless earnestness and his own special vocabulary that’s somewhere between wise high-plains drifter and fandom jargon. Readers, fans, and other people of interest – really, basically everyone – are “buckaroos”. Life, experiences, stories, beliefs, career – that’s your “trot”. Buckaroos in Tingle’s orbit don’t die – they get a visit from, or a ride on, “the lonesome train”, which has also been known to represent “suffocating existential dread”. And the self-explanatory first principle at the heart of all his work is that Love Is Real, and stories, whether erotic or existential, prove it.
Tingle has spoken extensively and specifically (if often in the third person) about reckoning with his sexuality, gender, and neurodivergence, but it would be clear enough from his novels that this part of his trot is at the heart of his storytelling. His protagonists are queer young(ish) people from small towns or cities in flyover states, struggling to come out to family or old friends. All three of his recent horror novels occur in a shared universe – Camp Damascus’ titular Christian conversion camp is referenced in Bury Your Gays, and the favourite 90s sci-fi show of the latter’s protagonist is mentioned repeatedly in Lucky Day. They’re set in a US where the forces of capitalism, Christofascism and chaos don’t stay hidden but rather manifest as otherworldly entities who must be faced and defeated using the power of radical acceptance and love – which, he cannot emphasise enough, is real.
It’s not subtle. But, to quote the great Garth Marenghi, I know writers who use subtext and they’re all cowards.
The literal mask he wears, Tingle has explained, helps him be more authentic, as it requires less effort expended on autistic masking. But he also stays in character because he’s had a career as a creative, hinting repeatedly that he’s been working in some kind of public-facing performance or persona since he was relatively young. There is a persistent rumour, mostly tongue-in-cheek, that he is secretly the ruggedly handsome actor (and best Hollywood Chris) Chris Pine.
But for the most part, true buckaroos know the respectful thing to do is to let Chuck run Chuck’s own trot.