Lucky Day by Chuck Tingle
Release date: 8/12/25
Published by Tor Publishing Group
By Matt Spaulding
Lucky Day is the third mainstream horror novel by internet sensation Chuck Tingle, and it’s easily his most bonkers. Though not as scary as Camp Damascus and last year’s incredible Bury Your Gays, this novel is still packed with plenty of strange and gross moments while still exploring the more existential horrors of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life and the randomness of the universe, all while ultimately proving Chuck’s mantra: “love is real.”
The book opens with Vera, a statistics and probability professor, living through the horrors of a worldwide disaster of ridiculous events that comes to be known as The-Low Probability Event. It’s one of the most bizarre scenes I have ever read. Fish rain from the sky. A monkey attacks people. It’s like the part in Ghostbusters where Venkman yells “dogs and cats living together! Mass hysteria!” It’s a wild ride.
Jumping ahead in time, we find Vera has decided everything is meaningless. She’s practically shut into her apartment waiting to die. That’s when Special Agent Layne enters her life. Layne works for an unchecked government agency investigating the LPE, and he’s maybe tracked its cause to a casino in Las Vegas where the odds are, somehow, in the players’ favor. Yet the house somehow still makes money. That shouldn’t be possible. And the casino is owned by a shady organization that Vera had been working to bring down before the LPE. With her fire (kind of) relit, Vera and Layne head off to Vegas.
Tingle’s imagination has yet to fail to amaze me. The Low-Probability Event, the events that take place later, and the reasons behind all of it, are all incredibly creative and entertaining. On top of that, the attention to statistics, probability, and other things I can’t reveal because they give away certain things, it’s all so well researched and thought out. I don’t know if Tingle was interested in these topics before writing this novel or if he dove into them just for this, but, either way, I commend him. I always love and appreciate when an author knows (or at least seems to know) their stuff when tackling deep subjects.
Lucky Day also explores what it means to live and love in a world that exists in a godless universe full of pain (my words, not Tingle’s). Vera’s crisis after living through the LPE when she thought everything in the universe was based on rules and order is something I think a lot of people go through, especially in the modern age when everything we see on the news and on social media seems to be awful all the time. But, Tingle believes that love is real. It’s written on the pink sack he wears to stay anonymous. And, personally, I agree with him. And that belief comes through by the end of the novel, leading to a very satisfying character arc.
Lucky Day is yet another winning read from Tingle. And I can’t wait to read it again while I wait for what he puts out next.