Every now and then, a book feels like it was written with me in mind, improbably straddling my niche interests and life experience to create something that seems lab-designed wholly for me. Chuck Tingle’s Lucky Day is that kind of book. I’ve loved his past two horror novels — Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays — so I was primed to enjoy this one, which is half “The X-Files,” half “Poker Face,” and all fun, but I didn’t expect it to be so (statistically) significant.

At the center of the story is Tingle’s leading lady, Vera, a former statistics professor and survivor of the “Low-Probability Event” (LPE), a catastrophic nightmare that killed nearly 8 million people worldwide and resulted in the death of Vera’s mother and the dissolution of her engagement to her fiancée, Annie. The day of the disaster, fish rained from the sky, chimpanzees ran free in the streets of Chicago, and people spontaneously combusted in their living rooms.

That day was a turning point for Vera, who planned to come out to her mother as bisexual, introduce her “roommate” Annie as her betrothed, and celebrate the publication of her book, which took sociological and statistical aim at the strangely patron-friendly casino the Great Britannica. The day also resulted in the formation of the top-secret, license-to-do-whatever-the-hell-they-want Low Probability Event Commission (LPEC), which has been investigating the strange occurrence and its ripples ever since.

Following the LPE, we see Vera in her mother’s home in Lake Geneva, feeding pâté to the street cat she eventually finds dead in her yard and lamenting her reality: that nothing, truly nothing, matters. She’s completely given up on Annie, her position as the youngest stats professor in University of Chicago history, and life itself. That is, until she meets one wild card of a government official in Agent Jonah Layne of the LPEC. Layne conscripts Vera to join him in investigating the Great Britannica’s parent company, Everett Vacation and Entertainment, which Vera literally wrote the book on. What follows is truly one of the better episodes of “The Twilight Zone” that I’ve ever read.

Lucky Day is, fundamentally, a rollickingly fun horror novel that is somehow jovial in its exploration of eldritch terrors and rips in the space-time continuum. It makes statistics fun. Its A+ cast of characters, including casino head Denver (a smooth-talking, no-bullshit woman cosplaying as a wealthy cowboy for no apparent reason), engaging Las Vegas locale, and commitment to the sci-fi bit make it a remarkable read.

Its organizing metaphor — a sort of quantum-physics exploration of what might happen if you come out and everything goes wrong, or right — is compelling, even if the premise forces an obvious but satisfying ending. But what really sets Lucky Day apart is the same thing Tingle drives home in each of his books: a dedication to showcasing the very real power of love — for oneself, for humanity, and for possibility.

It was statistically unlikely that I wouldn’t enjoy this book — I’ve yet to meet a Tingler I haven’t — but it’s always satisfying when every variable falls exactly into place, resulting in a model (stay with me here) that predicts one helluva good time. And when it comes to writing I’m powerless not to recommend, anything by Chuck Tingle is going to fall squarely in my confidence interval.

Nick Havey is a thriller and mystery writer and a lover of all fiction. His work has appeared in the Compulsive Reader, Lambda Literary, and a number of peer-reviewed journals.