The blurb:
Four years ago, an unthinkable disaster occurred. In what was later known as the Low-Probability Event, eight million people were killed in a single day, each of them dying in improbable, bizarre ways: strangled by balloon ropes, torn apart by exploding manhole covers, attacked by a chimpanzee wielding a typewriter. A day of freak accidents that proved anything is possible, no matter the odds. Luck is real now, and it's not always good.
Vera, a former statistics and probability professor, lost everything that day, and she still struggles to make sense of the unbelievable catastrophe. To her, the LPE proved that the God of Order is dead and nothing matters anymore.
When Special Agent Layne shows up on Vera's doorstep, she learns he's investigating a suspiciously—and statistically impossibly—lucky casino. He needs her help to prove the casino’s success is connected to the deaths of millions, and it's Vera's last chance to make sense of a world that doesn't.
Because what's happening in Vegas isn't staying there, and she's the only thing that stands between the world and another deadly improbability.
If there's anyone out there proving that marching to the beat of your own drummer is a winning plan, it's Chuck Tingle. I mentioned back in my review for Bury Your Gays that I'm glad he made the leap into horror, and Lucky Day continues his streak of inventive, idiosyncratic and very enjoyable traditionally published books. The sheer brutality and Mousetrap-level insanity of the Low-Probability Event is unmistakeably Chuck Tingle—I genuinelly can't think of another author who wold produce that level of batshit off-the-wall and bloody.
Vera survives that day but loses much that's dear to her as well as her sense of the world having any kind of logic in it. I don't know if Tingle goes in for names with meaning but, given her role in the novel—not just looking for the truth behind the LPE but having the legs completely taken out from under her by the lack of order in the world and needing to find her place again—'Vera', a name of Slavic origin meaning 'faith', seems particularly apt.
As in Bury Your Gays, there's an underlying logic to what's going on and it's up to Vera to unpick the clues and work out how exactly this all hangs together. Along the way, she has to survive betrayal, some truly twisted events, and her own lack of giving a damn in the fate of the world. As much as anything else, it feels like this book is about grief: picking up after something world-shattering and going on again, finding your own meaning when everything else in the world stops making sense. It's an unconventional exploration of it, but it works, and works pretty well, too.
Started: 25 October 2025
Finished: 28 October 2025
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