Lucky Day is a 2025 horror novel by Chuck Tingle.
On May 23rd, luck was proven to be real in the most disastrous manner possible: the Low Probability Event swept across the world. Vera Norrie, a statistician, survived the event; her mother, and almost eight million other people, weren't so lucky, dying in bizarre manners ranging from being strangled by balloon strings to being hit in the head with raining fish being bludgoned to death by a monkey with a typewriter.
Four years later, Vera is estranged from her fiance Annie and is in a nihilistic spiral which worsens by the day. One day, Agent Jonah Layne of the Low Probability Event Commission, a government agency with massive power and zero oversight, contacts her for assistance with investigating the Great Britannica Casino in Las Vegas— Vera investigated it a few years before the LPE happened. Now, the LPEC believes might be connected to the original LPE— it turns out almost everyone who died on May 23rd won big at the Casino, which advertises a higher win rate than almost any other casino on the strip...
Lucky Day contains examples of:
- Benevolent Conspiracy: The Low Probability Event Commission presents itself as this, giving payouts to survivors of the LPE and trying to make sure whatever happened on May 23rd never repeats. Subverted; LPEC performed human experiments with luck to try and recreate a potentially beneficial LPE, and was funneling almost all of the money for the survivor's fund towards itself.
- Bittersweet Ending: The LPE events are stopped by returning the creature that was employed by the Great Britannica back into the void from whence it came. Vera is forced to kill Layne to save her own life after it becomes clear that she's expendable. Vera, after leaking what LPEC did to study the Low Probability Event, becomes an Anti-Nihilist and breaks out of her suicidal spiral, realizing that though nothing matters, everything is connected, and that gives some meaning to her life. The novel ends with her attempting to contact Annie, and though we don't see the response, her phone buzzes after she texts her ex-fiance.
- Bland-Name Product: Lucky Crisps for Lucky Charms cereal. Vera finds a horseshoe-shaped marshmallow from it right before an LPE kills seventy-seven people.
- Boomerang Bigot: Layne, right before the LPE at the Great Britannica that kills 77 people, says that bisexual people aren't real... right after saying he's gay himself.
- Borrowed Biometric Bypass: After Denver is killed by the alien... thing in the desert, Vera uses her face to unlock her phone.
- Chekhov's Gun:
- The seemingly random numbers that the radio in the truck which kills Vera's mother spouts out turn out to be the coordinates of the plot hole that caused the original LPE.
- Vera's suicidal tendencies even surface when she's in a car, where she refuses to put on a seatbelt. She finally does in one of the last chapters, but in an ironic twist, Layne isn't wearing one, and gets launched through the windshield and killed.
- Contrived Coincidence:
- The first sign Vera sees of the original Low Probability Event, before the mass death occurs, is when she's telling Annie about how she used to mark pennies she collected with gold star stickers... and a random penny she picks up happens to have a gold star sticker on the back. Another one of these gold star pennies is in Great Britannica's facility in the climax.
- All of the deaths caused by the LPE are this; there is no reason a chimpanzee wielding a typewriter should be in the middle of Chicago, but it still ends up slaughtering Vera's friend anyway.
- Death Seeker: Vera, following seeing her mother die during the LPE, cuts off all ties with the outside world, splits from her fianceé, and lives in squalor for four years, keeping a gun on the dining room table in case she ever gets up the courage to end her life. When she partners up with Layne, she doesn't even bother wearing a seatbelt.
- Different for Everyone:
- The interior of the plot holes that pop up around Low Probability Events look different to everyone; they have no objective interior and no atmosphere. Layne mentions that someone said it looked like his old bedroom, while Vera sees the cafe she was in right before the original LPE happened. Vera realizes that this is the human mind attempting to contextualize pure nothingness by creating something to fill the void so it won't go mad.
- The creature that came from the plot holes that acts as the head of the Luck Department is this as well; Vera sees it as a centipede, Layne claims it looks mechanical, and Denver says it looks mammalian.
- Five-Second Foreshadowing: Vera briefly discusses with an unnamed driver the possibility of something like an alien escaping from nearby Area 51. A few pages later, an LPE occurs, where this exact scenario happens.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: When Vera enters the plot hole, something communicates to her, and takes the form of her mother, in an attempt to get her to take another plot hole creature with her to worsen Low Probability Events and end the world.
- Four-Leaf Clover: A field of these popped up out of nowhere during Layne's first assignment as part of the LPEC. It led them to the first plot hole that the LPEC managed to discover.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Layne claims that very few children died as a result of the LPE. Justified, due to the fact that the LPE killed people who won big at the Grand Britannica Casino, and gambling laws in the US require you to be an adult.
- Laser-Guided Karma: Well, laser-guided luck, at least. It turns out that the original LPE, and all subsequent minor ones, kill individuals who have had major lucky streaks, and that the original eight million killed were all big winners at the Great Britannica. Those who were spared by the LPE lost at the Great Britannica, but because their good fortune was so mundane in comparison, they never noticed their windfall.
- Last-Name Basis: Vera with Agent Layne, to the point that she briefly doesn't realize she's observing his actions while inside the plot hole, as she forgets his first name is Jonah.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the last Chapter, Vera reads up on the potential effects of the plot holes; one of the effects she finds more fanciful, to the point where she wonders what the author was thinking, is all straight, cishet folks becoming rampaging monsters that go after queer individuals once a year. This was the plot of Tingle's first non-erotic novel, Straight.
- Lost Pet Grievance: Four years after the LPE, Vera briefly adopts a stray cat who she names Kat; the animal ends up dying under unknown circumstances in Vera's backyard, and it's enough to send Vera's nihilism into overdrive and she almost ends up killing herself. In the plot hole, the thing inside of it tries giving Vera a Breaking Speech by showing her scenes of desolation, including her backyard— but Vera notes the absence of Kat's remains, which causes her to start recovering from her years-long spiral.
- Lucky Seven: Horrifically inverted twice in the novel.
- Vera mentions that there were six Boeing 777s in the sky during the LPE, and all of them formed pairs that collided with each other during the event.
- Later, seventy-seven people are killed at an LPE at the Grand Britannic casino itself.
- Monkeys on a Typewriter: One of these kills Vera's friend Kevin during the Low Probability Event. The final chapter reveals that it was a chimpanzee that escaped from a zoo transport, hid out in a theater, and picked up a typewriter and put on some Elizabethan-style clothing before killing Kevin.
- No Bisexuals: Said basically verbatim by both Vera's mother and Layne. In the case of the former, it's basically the last thing said by Maria Norrie before she gets killed during the LPE.
- Outside-Context Problem: During a localized LPE proceeding the climax, Denver is dragged off by something that turns out to resemble one of The Greys, but has a face that splits open to reveal a paralytic proboscis. It incapacitates Layne, which indirectly ends up saving Vera's life.
- Shared Universe: Potentially. The Kingdom of the Pine from Camp Damascus is mentioned as a sect that managed to grow after the LPE. Harold Brothers from Bury Your Gays (2024) is stated to be part of the same conglomerate that runs the Great Britannica, but it's not clear if those are just references or if the stories all take place in the same setting.
- Small Role, Big Impact: Kat, the stray cat that Vera briefly cares for in the third chapter, ends up dying and worsening Vera's mental health. Ultimately, Vera noticing that Kat's remains aren't in her yard in the visions that the thing in the plot hole tries to show her makes Vera realize that caring about things that are fleeting is healthier than rushing towards oblivion because nothing matters in the long run.
- Straw Nihilist:
- Vera was severely traumatized by witnessing the LPE firsthand in Chicago, and repeatedly says she doesn't care about anything in life, to the point where she repeatedly contemplates ending her life throughout the course of the novel.
- The thing in the void that takes the form of Vera's mother is also this, claiming that nothing matters and attempting to end the world on account of this fact by introducing a second luck creature into Vera's reality.