Review: Lucky Girl, How I Became A Horror Writer by M. Rickert

Lucky Girl, How I Became A Horror Writer Is Just Disappointing

Lucky Girl, How I Became A Horror Writer (I’m shortening that to Lucky Girl) is a story that purports to be about Krampus. It’s not really. Its genre is horror—but it’s almost never scary. And the tagline about a person becoming a horror writer is a portal to so many other issues I’ll rant about later.

So, if you’re reading this review to ascertain if you want to read Lucky Girl, my recommendation is no. The dialog is weird and stilted, and the pacing is uneven. It’s a book that’s under a hundred pages in paperback and I did not zip through it like you might expect.

But let’s dig into why this book is a disappointment. Why it was somehow a slog to read. And what I blame this most on is how the book approaches its timeline.

Lucky Girl starts by taking us through the circumstances of a lonely, aspiring author. She’s dealing with poverty. She’s dealing with intense trauma from a serial killer attack. And, on Christmas, she manages to wrangle a group of people into attending a little party. They don’t know each other well—and the dynamics are strained, to say the least.

And this is an inventive way to do a Christmas horror story. Especially a short one. Lucky Girl could’ve jumped forward a year at a time, checking in on these characters. The book already has this underlying theme of the slow unfolding of tragedy. That, in pockets of time, life takes things away.

But then it decides that, no, we’re jumping ahead now. We get the backstory of that serial killer attack—and it is one of the few actually effective horror moments because of how realistically awful it’s presented—but that’s about it for a huge swath of pages. Lucky Girl lets most of everything else be glossed over. Our fledging writer is now a famous and successful horror author with none of that massive change of fate explored. She just is one now.

A Massive Time Jump Ruins The Character Growth

And it’s here where Lucky Girl double-irked me. First off, because of a personal connection. Because, hey, I am also a horror writer. You can read a ton of my horror short stories on this very website. And there are scenes in Lucky Girl where the main character, Ro, bristles at others implying that she’s supposed to be some way because she writes horror, even that she should have some defined personality, but the narrative also continuously gives “because it would make for a good horror story” as a motivation for dangerous undertakings. There is a strong few-sentence plot moment that actually does something interesting with this, that shows how other people can twist such notions to their own assumptions regardless of the artist, but it’s not hammered home much. If satire or commentary was the intended point—and I would happily read such a tale—then it needed to be about those ideas a lot more.  

And, secondly, Lucky Girl takes all of this plotting so far and makes it a backstory. The location changes. The tone changes. It gets meaner. It’s now setting up this gothic mansion setting in the snow and slipping into almost dream logic to justify revelations. And this could’ve also been a fine book. A book about the horrors of Krampus as a concept. But it goes under-explored by trying to drum up an almost wholly new style of conflict that feels like a classic murder mystery. You could almost expect Ro to become a detective-style protagonist, using her genre savviness to solve the crime. Lucky Girl doesn’t do that, though. It doesn’t have the time. Because it never does. Never. Why was this book neither long enough to utilize its own ideals nor just split into multiple books?

Also, why is this book weirdly full of body shaming? Why is it kind of ageist? Why does it totally underutilize Krampus as a concept when Krampus is mentioned on the cover of this book? It’s baffling. Utterly baffling. Lucky Girl is just not what I wanted out of a Christmas book or a horror book. It’s just wasted potential in the form of bounded paper.

Possibly Related Posts:

• Friday Fiction: Frozen Army
• Foundations: The 5 Best Artifact Cards
• Foundations: The 5 Best Multicolored Cards
• Friday Fiction: The Life of a Four-Man
• Transformers One: A Baffling Movie