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.
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.
"This wintry, melancholic little tale about a friend group's gift exchanges over the years manages to nest several different horror subgenres in one, like unwrapping each package to find the next one inside, somehow wrapping them up in a bow at the end."
CrimeReads
"Like the best of Rickert's darkly Gothic tales, the atmosphere is one of perfectly distilled dread, the narrative far more complex than it at first seems, and by the end of this tightly packed and elegantly told novella we feel as though we've read a much longer and quite haunting novel."
Locus
"Smooth and ruthless, Lucky Girl is M. Rickert at her ice-cold best."
