#Bookreview ‘Lucky Girl, How I Became A Horror Writer: A Krampus Story’ by M.Rickert

About the book…

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.

Oh this is a perfectly chilling novella, out now from Tor, released in time for spooky season-though to the dyed in the wool horror fan, every day is spooky season!

‘Lucky Girl’ is kind of a twist on Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, 4 seemingly disparate people telling seasonal ghost tales, only these have not a sting in the tail, rather, the echo of a tinkling bell which could, and will, summon monsters…

Luck is a subjective notion-the moniker lucky girl is ascribed to Ro-short for Roanoke-after surviving a horrendous childhood tragedy, she now exists in a world where she is trying to find herself as a writer, struggling with loneliness and finding connections with strangers at a diner leads to a friendship of sorts. Each tells a ghostly tale, and their gifts of stolen items which then resonate down the years, across the modern Facebook level of friendship or even, in some case, relationships and marriage.

The meeting is a catalyst for Ro’s career as a writer of crime novels, where she recreates the monsters from her childhood, haunted by the notion of a Krampus-what is the plural of Krampus? Is it Krampuses?- who, once summoned by a bell, will unleash death and destruction.

The gift Ro recieves, a silver bell, should be a comfort and indeed, it does become a kind of one as if she doesn’t ring that bell, then how can the mnsters be summoned?

Unless of course they are already there….

Genuinely chilling and with well rounded characters that you see through Ro’s eyes, you were never really certain whose side you were on . Even as Ro’s first person narrative gives you a sense of intimacy to the things which have happened to her, you never quite shake the notion that she is a writer who can craft and manipulate a situation to her advantage, I found this deeply affecting and the chilling nature of luck and how it can be manifested very seasonal-if you have behaved, Father Christmas will reward you, if not, Krampus might turn up-and I think this will be one of those stories which I tuck into as the weather turns chilly…

About the author…

M. Rickert also writes under the name Mary Rickert. How did this happen and why, you might ask. It is a reasonable question but that does not mean the answer is reasonable as well. There was a time when M. was a young writer, scribbling in notebooks and on the back of envelopes, who thought she wanted to disappear behind the stories she wrote. (She still feels that way, and rather enjoys writing about herself in the third person as if she were someone else.)

After years of rejections M. began publishing under the mysterious moniker, and was happy doing so, until she began to feel that she was repeating herself, or (and this is the weird part) repeating someone else who she once had been. At the age of 51 she decided to go back to school and earned her MFA as well as the rest of her name.

She also wrote a novel, ‘The Memory Garden’, published in May, 2014.

Links-http://www.maryrickert.com/

Twitter @tordotcom