A professor of probability whose life was shattered by a cataclysm known as the "Low-Probability Event" makes one last attempt at doing something meaningful in Lucky Day, a wildly inventive horror novel by Chuck Tingle (Bury Your Gays; Camp Damascus).
On the day that Vera Norrie comes out to her mother as bisexual and announces her engagement at her book-release party, an outbreak of terrifyingly absurd violence kills nearly eight million people. Four years later, she remains in the grips of depression. Then Agent Layne from the Low-Probability Event Commission asks for assistance investigating a casino that Vera wrote about in her book. The casino should be statistically impossible to operate at a profit and may be connected to the LPE. Vera's anger is enough to go back into the world.
In his erotica, Tingle has long been an expert at using the absurd to startle his readers into new ways of thinking. Never has he done so more thoroughly in his horror work than in Lucky Day. Scenes such as an attack by a typewriter-wielding chimpanzee dressed as William Shakespeare are as brutal as they are surreal. The central characters, Vera and Layne, are affected by their respective experiences during the LPE in markedly different ways. Layne, with his startlingly contrasting combination of ruthless Machiavellianism and enjoyment of simple things such as different kinds of ice cream, is simultaneously a delightful foil and a menace. As Vera discovers how to find meaning in the face of powerlessness, Tingle once again reminds readers that love is real. --Kristen Allen-Vogel, information services librarian at Dayton Metro Library