I finished Lucky Day a few weeks ago but have had a hard time getting started on this review.
You see, I really love Chuck Tingle’s work. I love everything that he’s about, from his extremely weird pornography (Space Raptor Butt Invasion and Pounded in the Butt by My Own Butt as well as literally hundreds more) to his outspoken stances on gender and sexuality (I once did a live reading of Lindsey Ram’s Ass Is Haunted By The Physical Manifestation Of His Hypocritical Words About Not Filling A Vacant Supreme Court Seat During An Election Year Which He Specifically Ask To Haunt Him) and his more mainstream horror novels, Camp Damascus (which was surprisingly good) and Bury Your Gays which was also good but by then I wasn’t surprised. Lucky Day might even supersede Camp Damascus as my new favorite Chuck Tingle novel. It’s led me to think about life in ways I never have before.
Lucky Day – Is it Horror?
So why am I having a hard time with this review? The difficulty is that I have a really hard time thinking of Lucky Day as a horror novel. I would describe it as an extremely weird, dare I say New Weird, science fiction novel with a few gory parts. The gory bits are fun, if you’re into that sort of thing, but they don’t necessarily further the plot or add to the story. As an example:
…it appears this woman has had black, three-foot-long parasols shoved into both eye sockets. These closed sun-umprellas are shockingly deep, destroying her eyes but also likely piercing her brain in a lobotomizing scramble… What I’d initially taken for elongated arms are actually normal hands gripping enormous kitchen knives. I understand the weapons–if this woman has retained any concept of what’s going on around her, she’s probably terrified.
Scenes like this are peppered throughout the book, but for the most part they’re in the background. We’ve never seen Parasol-Eyes before and will never see her again.
Low Probability Events
Which brings us to the main question of the review; what is the book about? How did such an unlikely, bizarre, thing occur to this poor woman? In fact, the opening chapters of the book recount merely a small fraction of the 7,954,000 bizarre deaths that occurred almost simultaneously around the world on May 23rd in what has since been dubbed the Low-Probability Event (LPE) when a bunch of, not impossible, but extremely unlikely bad things happened all at once. It’s a very cool idea, if you ask me.
The bulk of the story begins four years later when Vera, our main character and a mathematician who had been investigating the Great Britannica, a casino which has rigged its machines in favor of the players so that it should be losing money yet simply isn’t, is recruited by Agent Layne of the Low-Probability Event Commission (LPEC) a government organization with the authority to do basically whatever they want that was established to determine what, if anything, caused the LPE.
What follows is kind of an Odd Couple meets X-Files set up that leads them to said hotel, and later Area 51, where manipulations on the very fabric of reality have caused similar, small-scale LPEs to occur (which leads to a memorable scene involving escaped tigers and a wave-pool full of Lucky Crisp cereal and mashed up humans).
Tingle could have toned down the gore and written a sci-fi of the same quality but I know his contract is with Nightfire, who almost exclusively publishes horror. It almost feels a little bit like he just crammed some horror elements in which, yes, are fun and done well. And while they don’t further the plot necessarily, nor do they detract from the overall quality of the book.
Are graphic death scenes enough to make something a horror story per se? I suppose that’s up to the reader. Mainly, I don’t think of this as a horror novel because the ending left me not with a feeling of unnameable dread, like many horror stories do, but rather with a hopeful feeling of gratitude for all of the ways in which my life has gone right that I never think about. After all, as Vera points out, no one notices all the times they didn’t get hit by a car.