Chuck Tingle Is the World’s Greatest Author — And According to the Masked Writer, So Are You (Exclusive)

“I put on this mask, and then I can express myself,” says the author. “So it’s a conduit I think for that kind of expression.”

NEED TO KNOW

• Chuck Tingle wears a pink mask to create a “sacred space” for artistic expression and audience connection

• His book tours are immersive performance art events inspired by figures like Andy Kaufman

• Tingle emphasizes love and community as central themes in his work, encouraging everyone to see themselves as creators

Chuck Tingle calls himself the world’s greatest author — and wants you to know you’re the world’s greatest author too, even if you’ve never written a word.

Those outside Tingle’s formidable fan base may know him less for his bestselling erotic fantasies like Bury Your Gays, Lucky Day and the forthcoming Fabulous Bodies than the pink mask he wears during public appearances to conceal his everyday identity. The mask, Tingle explains, creates a kind of “sacred space” in which he can fully inhabit his art and encourage his audience to do the same. After all, there’s a long tradition of the pen name but not, Tingle points out, “the pen mask.”

“I believe Oscar Wilde said, ‘give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth,’” Tingle says. “It is easier to express yourself if you’re wearing a mask. It’s a conduit, I think, for that kind of expression. And then, on top of that, I try to be a little cagey, and I can’t really come out and give too many details, but without the mask, there are some folks that might recognize me, and so part of it, too, was I wanted this to be a place where I could untether from that.”

And in an age in which society is increasingly surveilled — voluntarily posting one’s every move on social media very much included — Tingle finds power in stepping away from that: “I think artistically, there is something in the air where more artists are saying, no, I want to become a symbol, almost.”

His annual summer tour too is not the standard bookstore reading, in which authors discuss their work or read to their audience and then take questions. A Tingle event is more like a one-man show or a piece of performance art inspired, in part, by forebears like Andy Kaufman.

“I’m autistic, and so the way that my brain works is generally to not necessarily accept the way that things have traditionally been done,” he explains. “I found, when I first started writing and doing book events, that I would say, why does the author just show up and read and answer a few questions? No one can really tell me, because to be blunt, it’s not a great event compared to what happens when you see a musician live, or an actor do a play or a musical.”

So Tingle decided to have a little more fun with it. “I am a performer, and so I’m very comfortable on a stage, I’m very comfortable speaking to people and interacting in that way, that I think a lot of other writers might not be,” he says. “It would probably be much stranger to show up to a Chuck Tingle event and have everything go exactly as you expect.”

He spends all year gathering ideas for his events, jotting them down as he works on his next book. Tingle releases a new horror novel every summer, and by the time the manuscript is done, he’s also got a rough draft of what the tour might look like. And that’s in keeping with the way he thinks about his work and the audience’s role in it.

“I think with art, you will always be redefining  your understanding of what it is, and also what it is will change as the audience interacts, so that art is not static,” he explains. “I will inevitably begin the book tour thinking, okay, here’s the message I want to talk about, here’s what the point of the show is. And then on the last date of the tour, I’ve realized, it’s actually this other slightly similar but askew thing. And so, that process of presenting them  in this way actually kind of evolves my own understanding of the art. It’s really beautiful, actually.”

Tingle, despite having originally created it, doesn’t presume to understand his work any better than his readers do.

“Once it’s out of your head and into other people’s hands, of course it’s gonna change. It’s no longer mine, it belongs to the world, and then at that point, I am simply in conversation with it,” he says. “Even when I’m making it, I don’t have the right to be like, this is what it is. Art is shared between the audience and the author, and I would never suppose that I have ownership of it in that way, in a philosophical way.”

And that’s tangential to the central message (so far) of his newest book, Fabulous Bodies: “an obsession with competition.”

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“I think that there has been an entire swath of people, culturally, like influencers, that have been for a very long time peddling the idea that the natural order of things is to consume, and to destroy, and to crush and be the strongest,” he explains.

“When I actually look at what is the point of this? Like, what are we all programmed to do? Really, it is not to consume. Consumption is actually kind of a mutation, a side effect of what we’re really here to do, which is to create. Everything in the universe, whether you think the Big Bang was religious or not, there was nothing, and then there was something. The inertia of all things in the entire universe is to expand, to grow, whether it’s mold going across tile, or, you know, animals evolving over time, and that the reason that human beings are in the position that we are in is not because we were the most brutal. There are other brutal animals. It is actually because we created community. It’s because we formed, like, tribes and cities, we created art, and the best way to make cities, to have community, is to love.”

Love, for Tingle, isn’t just the undercurrent of all of his work. It’s a central message not just to his books, his events and his presence as an author, but the world in general.

“Love is the  thing that everything is built for, and I would say that any alteration from that, while there are many, and there have been horrible things that happen throughout history, those are alterations from the ultimate purpose, which is to create community and to love,” he says.

He doesn’t take the love of his fans lightly, either. “The audience is, in itself, an artist as well. I think that, every time someone, like, writes a review of your book, every time someone reads it, they are, also becoming the artist, because the art is not necessarily the stacks of paper and the ink. It is the shared experience of all of us participating. All art is the performance of it, and because of that, we are actually all artists together.”

“If I could fully appreciate and understand and really have the appropriate amount of gratitude for that, I would probably constantly be in tears of joy, and not even be able to have this conversation,” he adds. “It is so powerful and so overwhelming. It’s moving in a way that’s hard to describe.”

But Tingle also wants his fans to know, which is also in keeping with the themes of his newest book, that he’s far from unique in the artistry that is living in the world.

“What’s so amazing about it, is, like, it’s happening every day. I just might be a more visible part of it, because I’m wearing this mask, and people know who I am, but everyone, everyone is a creator, whether they know it or not, he says. “Anytime you do anything, there are hundreds of thousands of infinite tethers coming off of that, connecting you to people. I think it’s really easy to see someone like me and be like, oh, think of all the tethers, think of all the ways you’re changing folks. Everyone’s doing that all the time in ways that are unfathomably important and beautiful.”

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Fabulous Bodies hits shelves on July 7 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.

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