Skip navigation

Monthly Archives: August 2025

Lucky Day: A Review

New Chuck Tingle horror means that it’s my lucky day. The mysterious man behind Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays is back, and he’s about to throw a curveball the likes of which you’ve never seen.

Vera Norrie is a statistician and University of Chicago professor who is about to celebrate the release of her first book, a takedown of Everett Vacation and Entertainment. On May 23rd, she and her fiancée, Annie, are going out for brunch with a group of their friends and Vera’s mother. The whole day has been meticulously planned by Vera as a way of coming out as bisexual to her mom and announcing their planned marriage. When things don’t go quite as hoped, Vera’s mother storms out of the diner with Vera close on her heels, and then all hell breaks loose.

May 23rd would become known as the Low-Probability Event, a disaster of nearly impossible (and statistically ridiculously unlikely) proportions. Nearly eight million people die that day, and Vera flees from the carnage, leaving everything and everyone else behind. I’m not going to say more about the event itself here, because there’s something to Tingle’s crafting of a series of Rube Goldberg-esque deaths that rival anything seen in the Final Destination films that just needs to be experienced for oneself.

Four years after the LPE, Vera’s depression and isolation are interrupted by the arrival of Jonah Layne, an agent for the Low-Probability Event Commission. He’s on a mission to expose Everett Vacation and Entertainment and their flagship Vegas hotel and casino, Great Britannica, as being somehow behind the disaster of May 23rd, and he’s come to get Vera’s help. She’s enlisted as a consultant to examine the reality behind the LPE, and decides to tag along with Agent Layne, mostly because he’s picked the same fight that she once had all those years ago. The big problem is that, while there was only ever one major low-probability event, there’s been a lot of little ones. For Vera and Agent Layne, things can only get weirder.

Lucky Day is an absolute blast to read. It may not appear as strictly horror on the outside, but Tingle’s writing will leave you questioning the odds of, well, everything you could ever fear. Vera is a painfully relatable protagonist, dealing with utter chaos and devastation by functionally shutting down and ignoring society because, after the LPE, nothing really matters. Agent Layne is a delightful foil, a hyper-competent federal agent reminiscent of Twin Peaks‘ own Dale Cooper or Tingle’s own Dark Encounters (the X-Files-esque TV series Tingle’s protagonist, Misha, was writing in Bury Your Gays). The book is out in the world as of Tuesday, August 12th. My utmost thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for granting me access to an eARC in exchange for a fair review.

Black Flame: A Review

I love when Gretchen Felker-Martin releases a new book, and today is no exception. Black Flame is out in the world today, and that’s more than a little terrifying to think too much about.

It’s 1985, and Ellen Kramer is working as a film and negative restorer at a Staten Island archival firm. When a long lost German film, “Black Flame,” arrives at their building, Ellen and her coworkers are torn. It’s not a popular kind of movie, after all. It’s full of queer people in gender-bending roles, made on a low budget, and only recently recovered from the collection of a now-deceased Nazi officer. The film itself is in horrible shape, requiring lots of extra care and attention from the restoration team. The work, however, would pay enough to keep the firm afloat for most of the next year. Never mind the fact that it has the chance to fix the firm’s public image after their last big project’s connection to the KKK brought all the wrong kinds of attention to them. With that kind of money in the offering, Ellen’s boss leaps at the opportunity. He also decides that Ellen, being Jewish, should head up the effort to restore a lost work by a great Jewish director.

Ellen’s very uncomfortable with all of this. It makes her think of her ex, Freddie, and the time the two of them spent together. Time that she would much rather consider a phase after the two of them broke up. It doesn’t help that her parents are trying to set her up with a nice young man who might become mayor someday. They’re concerned that if she doesn’t get married and have children soon, it might be too late for her. The work strains her relationships with her coworkers too, to the point where all Ellen wants is to finish restoring the print so that she can be rid of the film forever.

That’s not how this is going to go. After accidentally cutting her hand on the film negative, things start to get progressively weirder. Ellen begins to question everything she knows about herself, her sexuality, her gender, her religion, her family history, and even reality itself. As the work stretches on, more and more of the past begins to bubble up to the surface. Some things, after all, will always refuse to remain hidden, and the costs of bringing “Black Flame” back into the present are far more severe than anyone could have anticipated.

Black Flame is a quick, almost frenetic short novel, clocking in at just over 200 pages. It’s far shorter than Felker-Martin’s earlier works, Manhunt and Cuckoo, but it’s no less gruesome and scary. Body horror remains one of her strongest suits, but the tension that she builds with Ellen in such a short period of time is absolutely incredible. I raced through this book out of sheer desire for the release of finishing and seeing how the end finally arrives.

My utmost thanks to Tor Nightfire and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for a fair review. Black Flame is on shelves today, August 5th. Go get yourself a nice, fast-reading spooky. It’s almost Hallowe’en, after all.