Books Like Chuck Tingle: 10 Reads for When You Need More Absurd Love
There is no author quite like Chuck Tingle, which is the problem. Once you have read enough of him, you start to notice how few other books are willing to take a completely ridiculous premise and then refuse to wink at it. Everybody else lets you know they are in on the joke. Tingle never does, and that is the entire magic.
So this list is built around that one quality. Absurd premise, played straight, with real feeling underneath. Some of it is monster romance, some of it is bizarro fiction, some of it is warm and gentle, and a few are my own Southern cryptid comedies, which I will flag clearly when we get there.
Start with Chuck Tingle’s own novels
If you only know the short books, with the titles you have to read twice, go here first. Tingle has published over three hundred and fifty of those, picked up a Hugo nomination in 2016 for Space Raptor Butt Invasion, and answered it with a book called Slammed in the Butt by My Hugo Award Nomination. Then he started writing horror novels, and they turned out to be genuinely good.
Camp Damascus
Published in 2023 and nominated for the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, which is the moment a lot of people who had only laughed at the titles realised he could really write. It is a horror novel about a conversion camp, it is frightening, and it is angry in the right direction. If you want proof that the love-is-real philosophy has teeth, start here.
Bury Your Gays
2024, and a horror novel aimed squarely at the Hollywood habit of killing off queer characters for drama. Funnier than Camp Damascus and just as pointed. If you liked the first, you will like this more.
Authors like Chuck Tingle
C.M. Nascosta, Morning Glory Milking Farm
The closest thing to Tingle’s warmth in monster romance. Violet is over-educated, in debt, and takes an unusual job at a farm where her client is a minotaur. The premise sounds like a Tingle title and the book is sincere about it, which is exactly the right move. High heat, a real happy ending, and the first book in the Cambric Creek series, so there is plenty more once you are hooked.
Carlton Mellick III
If what you love about Tingle is the sheer strangeness, go to Mellick. He helped build the bizarro fiction movement around Eraserhead Press, and his books take absurd worlds completely seriously in the same way. Satan Burger was his first novel and is still the usual starting point. Less romance, more weird, and very much its own thing.
T.J. Klune
For Tingle readers who are really there for the kindness. Klune writes warm, whimsical fantasy about found families and people being gentle with each other against the odds. No butts are invaded by anything. It still scratches the same itch, because it believes in love without apologising for it.
Alexis Hall, Boyfriend Material
A romantic comedy about two men who start fake dating and slowly stop faking it. No monsters, but the same combination Tingle does so well: genuinely funny, genuinely queer, and far more tender than it lets on at first. A good pick for the days you want to laugh without being quite so strange about it.
Books like Chuck Tingle, the Southern version
These are mine, so take the pitch with the salt it deserves. I want to be upfront about the difference, because Tingle readers care about this: his books are queer and kind, and mine are Southern, straight, and considerably cruder. What we share is the thing on the cover. A premise nobody should be able to write a whole book about, played completely straight to the end.
I Got Cucked by a Cryptid: Mothman
The most Tingle-shaped title I have. Don is a warehouse worker in Point Pleasant whose miserable life changes the night a seven-foot winged thing with burning red eyes takes an interest in his girlfriend, Kayla. Most men would call the police. Don buys trail cameras. Part paranormal romance, part cosmic humiliation, all of it deadly serious about itself. Read the summary.
Simping for Sasquatch
Dale Sturdivant is forty-three, married nineteen years, and runs two hundred and eleven vending machines across three counties. He is not unhappy, and the book takes him seriously about that. Then he goes out to take a leak on a family camping trip and comes back a different man. The gentlest of my cryptid books and the one closest to Tingle’s heart. Full story here, or read the summary on Amazon.
I Knocked Up Bigfoot’s Sister
Tater McClendon was a regular drunk in a Kentucky holler until one moonlit night and one very bad decision. Now he is expecting a baby with Bigfoot’s sister, the whole clan wants him dead or married, and the humans have decided he is a traitor to his own kind. If you want more like this, my bigfoot romance books guide has the rest. Read the summary.
Ghosts of Dicks Past
Lola LaRue has spent years charming lonely men out of their money. Then every one of them comes back as a ghost, in person, with opinions. A haunting where the horror is having to sit in a room with your own history. Read the summary.
White Trash Wendy Fights an AI Anaconda for Alimony
An AI anaconda. An alimony dispute. Florida. That is the entire pitch and I stand by every word of it. Read the summary.
Where to start
If you have only read the short books, Camp Damascus. It will change how you think about him.
If you want the monster romance with the same sincerity, Morning Glory Milking Farm.
If you want the strangeness turned up past anything Tingle does, Carlton Mellick III.
And if you want a cryptid, a Southern accent and no dignity anywhere, Simping for Sasquatch.
One honest note
Nobody on this list is Chuck Tingle, and nobody should try to be. The point of him is that he is the only one. What these books share is the nerve to take a ridiculous idea completely seriously, which is rarer than it should be and worth seeking out wherever you find it.
If you want to see exactly how my books compare with Tingle’s and a few other authors side by side, that is on the comparison page. For the spicier end of the shelf, funny erotic books, or browse the full catalog.
