If the universe proves itself to be utterly meaningless, what do you do next? For Vera, the narrator of Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle, the answer is: rot in your dead mother’s house for four years in a general nihilistic malaise until a government agent bursts through your door because he needs your help taking down a Las Vegas casino. Lucky Day follows a bisexual statistician named Vera during and after the events of the Low-Probability Event, when nearly 8 million people die in freak accidents during the same 20-minute period.
Vera is in some ways the perfect vehicle for the story: her life before the Event revolved around finding mathematical order in the universe, and her life after the event is characterized by coming to terms with the fact that that order does not, and indeed has never existed.
The events of Lucky Day are simultaneously ridiculous and realistic, especially with the soul-crushingly realistic way the world deals with the aftermath of the Low-Probability Event: they move on. People are devastated, nearly eight million are dead and many more injured, yet the world reacts the way it always does: it pauses for what feels like an “appropriate” amount of time, then it keeps going with thoughts and prayers. It’s like a cosmic version of a day so terrible it feels like it should be gloomy and pouring rain outside, but instead the sky is the bluest it’s ever been. The combination of abject horror with a deep silliness keeps the novel constantly teetering on an edge.
This book tackles a subject that can quickly veer into philosophical ramblings with the kind of abject ridiculousness that it warrants. The parts of the Low-Probability Event that Vera witnesses include fish raining down from the sky, a murderous monkey dressed in Shakespearean garb with a typewriter, and a lady whose eyes have been gouged out by umbrellas (the descriptions in this book aren’t for the faint of heart). This is all in the first thirty pages of the book—it accustoms you as the reader to the level of absurdity that is necessary to look at what nothingness and chaos actually means.
Lucky Day, at the end, comes to a similar conclusion to 2022’s blockbuster hit Everything Everywhere All At Once; if everything is meaningless, then we might as well enjoy what we can and love the people in our lives. The story of this novel is similarly focused on a mother-daughter relationship, one strained by the daughter’s queerness and the mother’s “traditional” beliefs. While reading, I was returned to the moment I first watched the rocks scene between Joy and her mother in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Reading the book felt like watching that scene, drawn out over 200+ pages. If you’ve been chasing the high of that movie for the last three years, this book will scratch the itch, only with the concept of fate and luck rather than parallel universes. Both stories come down to the same idea: the universe is an inexplicable, messed-up, confusing place, and sometimes we can’t even try to make sense of it—we just have to live in it.
Reading Lucky Day, you get the singular and exhilarating feeling that the message of the book and the book itself are one and the same. It can stand on its own, of course, but I think its message resonates even more if you know something about its author’s back catalog.
If you’ve never read or heard of Chuck Tingle before, then I am absolutely overjoyed to be the one to break the news. If you do know of him, then you know where this is going already. Chuck Tingle is an enigmatic, anonymous, epically prolific writer who delights in all things bizarre and gay. He publishes both traditional horror novels, such as Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays (both of which I also loved), and ebook-only short stories he calls “Tinglers.” The titles of these Tinglers alone are a journey: there’s “Getting Dirty With My Sentient Lesbian Washing Machine,” “Bisexual Vampire Unicorns Teach Me the Importance of the Vampire Cough,” and of course, the classic “Not Pounded By The Physical Manifestation Of Chuck Tingle’s Traditional Publishing Deal Because He Writes About More Than Just Pounding However If This Book Was About Pounding That Would Be Okay Too Because There’s Nothing Wrong With Sexuality In Art.”
Chuck Tingle’s “Tingleverse” deserves an entire article devoted to it—perhaps even a full-length academic thesis, if anyone is feeling up to it. But that last title example gives you some idea of the many levels of meta we’re working with. Tingle has managed to thread the needle and be both a niche author of erotic sentient object fiction and a critically-acclaimed, commercially successful novelist. He embodies the very absurdity that Lucky Day highlights—that the world is somehow both a very silly and a very serious place. Silliness can’t exist without seriousness, and vice versa, so trying to parse them out from one another is useless. It’s the kind of balm that any book about nothingness needs: that if nothing matters, then maybe everything does.
Content warnings: violence, gore, biphobia
Emilia Ferrante is a book-lover and writer living in Paris studying to get her Master’s degree. She is the co-host of Sapphink, a sapphic English-language book club, and loves crocheting, going on walks, and listening to the rain.