Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle comes out in August!

Chuck Tingle’s third horror novel, Lucky Day, will be published by Tor on August 12th, and you can preorder it now! I think it’s his best yet.

(Content warning: this spoiler-free review discusses bisexual erasure as it occurs in Lucky Day.)

In Lucky Day, we meet Vera, a young, Type-A Statistics professor. Her hair is so smooth, and her skirt is so smooth! And her book is coming out in a couple days, and her hot girlfriend loves her, and she is about to come out to her mother! Everything’s coming up Vera.

And then, right in the middle of a fraught discussion while her mother is telling her that bi people don’t exist, it begins to rain fish in Chicago. Vera’s mom dies a gory death, one of Vera’s friends is bashed to death by a crazed chimpanzee wielding a typewriter and dressed as Hamlet, and all around the world, nearly eight million people suffer similarly unlikely and grisly deaths on the same day. It becomes known as the Low-Probability Event (LPE).

Something like that changes the world. The story of Lucky Day picks up four years later, and Vera has retreated into feral ceiling-staring and ramen-eating; her relationship, her career, and her trust in any kind of predictability of the world shattered. Agent Layne of the Low-Probability Event Commission invades her solitude with a proposition: he wants Vera to help him investigate a company that seems somehow connected to the event that shook the world, the very company that Vera set out to expose as con artists in her book four years ago.

As it turns out, this is an interesting enough proposition to pry Vera off the sofa and into a series of unsettling adventures with some extremely bloody bits and a really satisfying eventual denouement.

Olivie Blake’s blurb calls Lucky Day “an existential masterwork,” and I see where she’s coming from on that. On the existential front, the occurrence of shockingly unlikely events leads Vera to question reality. Like the scene in The Matrix when the kid bends the spoon with his mind, and since we know a spoon won’t do that, we must conclude there is no spoon. Or the scenes in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, when they are flipping coins that only ever come up heads. Sure, that one is statistically possible, but it is so unlikely that after a while the characters begin to think that perhaps this is an indication that their world is not real.

Since Vera’s statistics have betrayed her, she decides her goal is nihilism, as believing in nothing seems less likely to disappoint her than believing in something that could go so catastrophically wrong as trusting people or probability. Also, the repeated insistence that she can’t be bi because “bisexuals don’t exist” happens right in her face as she, a bi person, is telling people she is bi. They can’t believe that, but they can believe a rain of fish? What is this world? While Vera tries for nihilism, it is by engaging with the world’s many horrors that she is able to better process what happened four years ago, as well as what is happening now.

After Tingle’s previous two horror novels, Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays, I was excited to learn what neurodivergent queer protagonist and what wild worldbending scenario we’d encounter next, and Lucky Day delivers . I think Tingle gets better at plotting and pacing horror with each book.