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This week I read Chuck Tingle's 2025 novel Lucky Day, and I really loved it. Let's run through the story (I won't spoil it), and then discuss it and two similar books, Penn Jillette's Random and QNTM's (ugh) There Is No Antimemetics Division.
Lucky Day
Vera is a statistician, and the youngest-ever tenured professor at the University of Chicago. She's at brunch with her female fiancee, close friends, and biphobic mother, all of whom are celebrating her new book. Instead, a surreal disaster kills eight million people around the world that day, including Vera's mother and some of her friends. This is only the beginning.
In the long, traumatized wake of the "low probability event" (LPE), Vera is recruited into a mysterious LPE organization because of her math skills and, to be frank, her lack of care for her own safety or any social ties she once had. The book is about, you'll see, but it's also really about Vera and how she no longer wants to live. She sees no point to life in general, and definitely not to her own life.
I really loved how this book used a specific, far-out event to activate a story about capitalism, bigotry, and community. Vera felt real to me. ("Vera" even seems to be from global words meaning "true." With her last name "Norrie," the name may mean True North.) Her core belief in the first lines of the book is that humans, animals, and even bacteria seek their peers for connection. The trauma strips her core and leaves her empty.
Random
Bobby Ingersoll must find a huge amount of money to pay off his father's debt and save his own life. This is kind of a genre unto itself, but Bobby decides to embrace randomness in order to obscure his own plans and thwart any of his instincts.
There's a lot I like about Jillette's 2022 book, but the main thing is that, like "Lucky Day," it carries a math idea through to its logical end. People can virtually never be random, and even when we try to draw a random pattern, we draw something far more regular and uniform than random. True randomness means that, sometimes, you get 100 heads in a row when flipping a coin.
In both books, characters find out that the appearance of an orderly world is misleading. It's interesting to me how the specifics play out after that.
There Is No Antimemetics Division
Marie Quinn leads a secretive department where she and her colleagues fight "unknowns," which are supernatural creatures of all shapes and sizes. In her group, they investigate antimemetic unknowns, meaning ones that erase your memory of them by nature, like a chili pepper that is spicy as a way to thwart predators.
This 2025 book is postmodern to a cutesy extent, meaning it's filled with textual gimmicks and sly references and jokes that I found really annoying. I think the idea of a self-erasing monster is fascinating, and memory erasure and time loops are very frightening to me. It's a great mechanic for what is essentially a horror story.
Without saying too much, "Lucky Day" is also about the ways our universe will wring out the most improbable-seeming things as just a fact of its infinitude. When you're surrounded by infinity, the odds of virtually anything you can conceive of are always greater than zero, by definition.
But this book did not work for me at all. The storytelling was gimmicky and didn't hold up the human side of narrative, instead becoming story spaghetti where everything was being erased over and over and then repaired over and over by everything else.
"Random" and "Lucky Day" dealt so meaningfully with consequences and anxieties -- I realized that's what I wanted but did not get from "Antimemetics Division."
In conclusion
I love cosmic or existential horror, and I love math, so the combination represented in all three of these books is right up my alley. (My post about Louise Hegarty's "Fair Play" is about these themes too, and I've also written about infinity as an existential and cosmic horror.)
If you've read any of these books or decide you want to, I'd love to hear about it! Thanks for reading.