Trigger warning for ludicrously graphic violence.
Chuck Tingle’s Lucky Day opens on what should have been a great day for Vera Norrie. Her book is about to be published and she’s celebrating with her fiancée, her friends, and (less great) her mother. But then, the Low Probability Event strikes and no one is ever the same. If probability can no longer be relied on and you can’t trust anything, how is one supposed to live?
For Vera, life after the Low Probability Event—the day when all of the billion to one accidents happened all at once—is downright depressing. She is no longer an up-and-coming mathematician. Her fiancée is gone. A lot of her friends are horrifically dead. She’ll never hear an approving word from her judgmental mother, because her mother was killed during the LPE, too. Now she lives on the funds the government awards to survivors, in the house she inherited from her mother in deepest suburban Wisconsin. Vera might’ve stayed glued to the couch forever if a very annoying government agent hadn’t turned up offering the possibility of an explanation for what the hell happened on everyone’s worst day.
Agent Jonah Layne’s response to the LPE was the complete opposite of Vera’s. Instead of hiding away from everything, he is determined to try everything at least once. Layne’s hedonism clashes enough with Vera’s nihilism to make her finally care about something for the first time in years. What really gets Vera off the couch is Layne’s firm conviction that there is something deeply, existentially wrong at the Great Britannica Hotel and Casino. The house is always supposed to win, and it does at the Great Britannica. What makes the place strange is that the players also win. The guests win enough that, according to Vera’s math, there’s no way that the Great Britannica should be raking in as much as they are. Most of the people who were killed during the LPE won something or at least stayed at the Great Britannica.
The first chaotic chapter of Lucky Day was more than enough to let me know that I was going to read something deeply weird and moderately (creatively) violent, but this is the first Chuck Tingle book I’ve ever read. I had no idea how much Tingle’s novel was going to tug at my heartstrings. This is no doubt the strangest book I’ve ever read about grief. And I am deeply thankful for that strangeness. I marveled at how Tingle tested Vera who was a fairly timid person even before the LPE. (I deeply felt the sting of the comments from Vera’s mother, for whom nothing Vera did or became would ever be good enough.) And I cheered for Vera as she discovered hidden depths of courage and empathy in the Las Vegas desert. This book is absolutely incredible.