I liked Chuck Tingle’s book Camp Damacus, but I loved Lucky Day (I still haven’t read Bury Your Gays). I found Lucky Day to be much more assured and solidly constructed than his first book, and its X-Files/Welcome to Nightvale sensibility and musings on existential vs nihilistic philosophies really hit the spot for me. I even liked the fact that what seems like a potential romance turns out to be something else.

Vera is a statistician and mathematician who is celebrating the launch of her first book when she, her friends, her fiancee, and her mother are caught up in the madness of what will later be known as the Low-Probability Event (LPE). Millions of people die during this event, which leaves everyone Vera knows as either confirmed or presumed dead.

Four years later, Vera lives in almost total isolation, barely surviving in a deep depression. One day Agent Jonah Layne from the Low-Probability Event Commission (LPEC) shows up. This commission operates with virtually no oversight or limits, and Layne wants Vera to help him figure out what caused the LPE. Vera is skeptical, saying,

Bad luck isn’t an explanation, it’s an excuse. Either way, it all leads to the same result. There is no god, and there is no science. Nothing matters, including this conversation.

However, the book Vera was writing four years ago was an expose of a gambling empire, and Layne believes that this same corporation may be responsible for the LPE. So Vera drags herself into the shower and a clean-ish outfit and accompanies Layne to Las Vegas where The Great Britannica Hotel and Casino looms. Vera insists that she doesn’t care what the outcome of the investigation is…but as events unfold, she becomes increasingly invested.

This is probably a good place to tell you that this is a horrifying book that deals in multiple types of horror. There is gore – so much gore, you guys. There are horrible, violent, sudden, brutal deaths. There is body horror. There is a kind of Lovecraftian void horror thing happening. Some of these moments are, depending on your sense of humor, kinda funny. Some are just tremendously terrible. If you took Final Destination, and you alternated it with X-Files and Welcome to Nightvale, and you amped the numbers up to almost eight million people, you might come close to this book. Obviously not all eight million die on the page. But an awful lot do. So brace yourself. However, with all this carnage, there is not a single moment of sexual assault, and that’s mighty refreshing.

I think that my favorite thing about Lucky Day is that it is full of surprises. Sometimes those surprises are shocking and horrific – out of the blue moments of gruesome death. But a lot of these surprises come from various tropes being set up and then subverted in ways that feel natural.

I don’t want to say what they are because I don’t want to spoil anything, but while I was constantly surprised I was never skeptical. Jennifer Crusie once pointed out:

The choice between honoring character to show growth and mutilating character to serve plot spells the difference between the delighted reaction, “I can’t believe she did that!” and the betrayed protest, “I don’t believe she’d do that.”

Through all the twists and turns of this story, I often felt shocked, or surprised, or dismayed, or happy, but I never felt that sense of disbelief. Sometimes people aren’t who we think they are at first. Sometimes the relationships, or the events, or the stages in our lives don’t pan out in the way we’ve always predicted. I enjoyed seeing Vera find her way back to life in unexpected ways.

I also enjoyed the way the book tackles philosophical issues without explicitly naming them. Insofar as I understand the concepts (and I don’t claim to fully grasp any of them), Vera begins the book as a believer in order. As a statistician, she adheres to the concept that the universe has certain predictable and comprehensible rules. As a wobbly existentialist myself, I enjoyed Vera’s engagements with what I understood to be nihilism and absurdism until she reaches an existential peace and comes to terms with her grief and uncertainty.

A recurring theme of the book is the importance of bisexual representation and the damage done by bisexual erasure. It’s painful to see Vera’s sexuality denied to her face by the people she should trust the most. I appreciated that even at her lowest point, Vera never accepts the judgement of others.

This book is strongly structured and balances humor, different kinds of horror, sadness, and a way to find purpose and healing in the midst of chaos. I adored it, but I cannot stress how incredibly gory and violent this book is. If you have a strong enough stomach, and you like the spooky conspiracy vibes of The X-Files and Welcome to Nightvale, you will probably like this too.