Camp Damascus

Rose Darling is a devout, deeply analytical twenty-year-old member of Kingdom of the Pine, a Christian sect in the small Montana town of Neverton founded on the teachings of Prophet Tobias Cobel, who received a divine vision after an Industrial Revolution workplace accident. Rose's strict religious upbringing frames her curiosity as spiritually dangerous. Her parents, Luke and Lisa Darling, enforce rigid discipline at home, and she has never read secular fiction.

One afternoon at a local swimming hole, Rose feels an intense but uncategorizable pull toward her friend Martina Coachman. While preparing to jump from the cliffs with her close friend Isaiah, Rose spots a pale woman in the forest with solid white eyes, unnaturally long fingers, a tight iron collar, and a red polo shirt bearing a name tag. The woman vanishes before anyone else sees her. On the drive home, Isaiah kisses Rose unexpectedly, and she rejects him.

At dinner, Rose's parents push her toward Isaiah. Rose begins coughing and vomits live flies onto her plate. Her parents dismiss the incident. She discovers her bedroom door is missing, though she remembers having one; her father insists it was never there. That night, browsing photos of Martina, Rose's body flushes with heat followed by chill. Going downstairs, she sees the pale woman by the television; the figure charges, then vanishes into a closet her father finds empty.

Rose's parents send her to Dr. Smith at the Kingdom of the Pine Therapeutic Outreach Center (KOPTOC), who dismisses the visions as hallucinations. At Isaiah's birthday party, vivid flashes of an unknown dark-haired girl invade Rose's mind during truth or dare. When Martina is dared to enter a closet with the person she likes, she chooses a fellow partygoer named Parker. Rose, devastated by inexplicable jealousy, leaves. In the hallway, she encounters the pale woman close enough to read her name tag: PACHID. Rose recognizes the name from The Book of Abramelin the Mage, an obscure 15th-century French demonology text. The demon passes through a wall and enters the closet. Martina tumbles out with her neck twisted in a half rotation, dead.

After Martina's death, Rose confronts Dr. Smith about demons. He prescribes pills she recognizes as a placebo, and she memorizes his safe combination. Critically, he refers to Pachid as "she," though all texts describe the demon as male, revealing he has seen the creature. Driving afterward, Rose encounters the dark-haired girl at a hillside park. The girl warns that contact endangers them both, reveals she knows Rose's name, coughs up flies, tells Rose she loves her, and flees. On the way home, a second demon, a bald man with a name tag reading RAMIEL, stands in the road. Rose accelerates through him and crashes into a tree.

Rose regains consciousness in her burning car with Ramiel watching from the forest. The demon retreats from fire but advances when she tries to leave. A crucifix and prayer prove useless, so Rose fashions a decoy, crawls under the car, and kicks Ramiel into the blaze. The demon burns to death; fire is its true weakness, the opposite of what the church teaches. In the ambulance, epinephrine triggers repressed memories of a tethering ceremony, a ritual in which a demon is summoned and bound to a person. Rose sees herself strapped to a stone slab as Dr. Smith presides over a machine that uses her blood to open a portal.

During three weeks of hospital recovery, Rose tests the link between Pachid's appearances and her emotions. Same-sex desire summons the demon; heterosexual fantasy does not. Thinking about the dark-haired girl brings Pachid directly before her, and the demon snaps Rose's pinky finger. Rose concludes she is gay, and a demon has been assigned to police her sexuality through fear, cold, and violence.

After returning home, Rose breaks into KOPTOC and opens Dr. Smith's safe. His notes focus on "the assignment" rather than her health, and invoices show her parents paid half a million dollars plus $300 monthly. A folder lists graduates of Camp Damascus, the church's conversion program, each paired with a demon's name; Rose's entry is paired with Pachid. Rose begins contacting others on the list. Ally Robertson, a congregation member assigned to a demon called Lepaca, freezes at the mention of Camp Damascus, tears streaming while she maintains a forced smile.

Rose calls her father, who sounds cheerful but shouts to someone else as the call ends. At home, her mother meets her on the corner with a duffel bag. Lisa confirms the family sent Rose to Camp Damascus because she is gay and warns that Luke waits inside with men carrying restraints, planning to force Rose back. Lisa lets Rose escape but refuses to leave herself.

Rose tracks down Saul Green, a former Camp Damascus counselor, at a remote farmstead. A heavily tattooed metalhead and devout Christian, Saul confirms that tethering is how Kingdom of the Pine summons demons and binds them to graduates to enforce heterosexuality. They theorize that the demons are mortal creatures from a freezing parallel dimension, and that depicting hell as fiery was a deliberate inversion to conceal the demons' vulnerability to heat. Saul reveals Rose's former girlfriend is named Willow but refuses to share her location.

Rose and Saul build weapons, including a copper-walled execution chamber and a homemade flamethrower. Rose lures Pachid by thinking about Willow, traps the demon, and incinerates it. Saul destroys his own demon, Mephasser. With both demons dead, Rose contacts Willow and reunites with her at Lebka Books, a bookstore where they originally met. Willow Crogall, a 21-year-old photographer, fills in the memories Rose has lost. Rose insists on returning to destroy the tethering machine. Willow agrees, and the three plan their infiltration.

Using drug-assisted meditation, Rose locates the underground facility beneath the camp's north cabins, a section labeled as under renovation. The trio enters at night and descends into a facility containing soundproof cells with more than 30 captive young people and a laboratory housing pale, worm-like parasites called Ligeian. Rose deduces these organisms from the demons' dimension inject memory-erasing eggs; the flies she has been coughing up are a byproduct. Dr. Smith confronts the trio at gunpoint. In the struggle, the Ligeian tank shatters and the worms overwhelm Dr. Smith, destroying his memory. Saul and Willow destroy the tethering machine while Rose unlocks the prisoner cells.

The trio emerges into a trap set by camp security, Pastor Pete Bend, the head of Camp Damascus, and collared demons. Pastor Bend orders everyone killed. Rose recites the Prayer for Release, a Latin incantation from a stolen demonology tome. The iron collars crack open. Freed, the demons ignore the queer campers and turn on the church's agents, dragging them through glowing portals to their frozen dimension. Willow detonates Saul's flamethrower tank, igniting a blaze that spreads across the camp.

Rose, Willow, and Saul escape as Camp Damascus burns. Rose reflects that the freed demons punished the persecutors rather than the persecuted, revealing an innate sense of justice that contradicts the congregation's bigotry. Rose and Willow share their first conscious kiss, an act of reclamation after a relationship erased and rebuilt. The novel closes with the blaze illuminating the Neverton valley, Rose's shadow stretching for miles and engulfing the city below.