REVIEW: Lucky Day (book) by Chuck Tingle

Lucky Day is horror. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Vera, her mother, and her friends are celebrating the upcoming publication of Vera's book. Vera has finally gotten the courage to come out to her mother as bisexual and tell her that she and Annie are engaged. It's going badly, and then the disaster that's later known as the Low-Probability Event begins. 

All over the world, but particularly in the US for some reason, horrible and statistically unlikely things happen, killing millions. Fish fall from the sky, causing an accident that results in Vera's mother's death. Vera witnesses one of her friends get beaten to death by a chimpanzee with a typewriter. All around her there is bewildering death and destruction, and in the end all Vera can do is run and keep running. 

Four years later, Vera is a shadow of her old self, limping along on the checks she gets as one of the survivors of the Low-Probability Event. She barely has the willpower to exist, and yet she also can't bring herself to commit suicide. Caring about anything seems utterly futile. 

Then Special Agent Layne, from the Low-Probability Event Commission (LPEC), shows up at her door. He's investigating a statistically impossibly lucky casino, the exact casino Vera wrote about in her book. The LPEC thinks it has some sort of connection to the Low-Probability Event and, in spite of herself and her determination not to care about anything, Vera finds herself drawn in. 

When people start dying in this one, you just have to roll with it, because there's just so much going on at once. At one point, there's an attempt to explain how some of the weirder stuff happened, but there's a lot of stuff that just...is. For example, I don't think we ever learned how, exactly, that one poor woman ended up with umbrellas in both her eyes.

Vera and Special Agent Layne were an odd pairing, the woman who was determined not to care about anything and the guy determined to enjoy every hobby, TV show, and general experience he could. I enjoyed following along with them, and I was looking forward to where Tingle would take the LPE stuff. He's so good at cosmic horror.

The ending was a lot. I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about all of it. But at least I enjoyed the journey.