Synopses & Reviews
A chilling tale of horror and hidden monsters 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.
Review
"Lucky Girl is as beautiful and disturbing as a Christmas present wrapped in barbed wire. Mary Rickert's one of my favorite writers, and she's never been more brilliant." — Daryl Gregory
Review
"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
Review
"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
About the Author
Before earning her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, M. Rickert (she/her) worked as a kindergarten teacher, coffee shop barista, Disneyland balloon vendor, and personnel assistant in Sequoia National Park. She has published the short story collections Map of Dreams, Holiday, and You Have Never Been Here. Her first novel, The Memory Garden, was published in 2014, and won the Locus award. Her second novel, The Shipbuilder of Bellfairie, was published in 2021. She is the winner of the Crawford Award, World Fantasy Award, and Shirley Jackson Award and has been nominated for the Nebula, Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, Sturgeon, and British Science Fiction Award. She currently lives in Cedarburg, Wisconsin.