Lucky Girl
How I Became A Horror Writer: A Krampus Story
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Lucky Girl, How I Became A Horror Writer is a story told across Christmases, rooted in loneliness, horror, and the ever-lurking presence of Krampus written by World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award-winning author M. Rickert.
“Smooth and ruthless, Lucky Girl is M. Rickert at her ice-cold best.”—Laird Barron
Ro, a struggling writer, knows all too well the pain and solitude that holiday festivities can awaken. When she meets four people at the local diner—all of them strangers and as lonely as Ro is—she invites them to an impromptu Christmas dinner. And when that party seems in danger of an early end, she suggests they each tell a ghost story. One that’s seasonally appropriate.
But Ro will come to learn that the horrors hidden in a Christmas tale—or one’s past—can never be tamed once unleashed.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this intimate, uneven Christmas horror novella, Rickert (The Shipbuilder) introduces a quartet of lonely strangers who meet at a diner during the holidays and agree to share a Christmas meal where they will tell each other ghost stories and exchange gifts. Playing the role of de facto host is Ro, a novelist whose experiences with holiday horror are all-too-real after a close call with home invasion and murder in her teens. When one of Ro's new companions gives her the gift of a small bell, long considered a means to summon the dreaded Krampus, she finds herself struggling to separate myth and campfire tale from a reality that threatens to become deadlier than any scary story. Rickert maintains a sense of wintery claustrophobia throughout and puts a twisty mystery at the story's heart, but a sense of cold remove from the violence and horror robs the tale of any substantial scares. Horrific events are always relayed after the fact, and many readers will feel cheated to receive retroactive explanations rather than being allowed to experience the frights firsthand. The climax does its best to tie together the story's many threads, but doesn't quite manage to wrap everything up into a satisfying conclusion. This delivers on atmosphere but not much else.
