Randy reviewed this tale for our annual Countdown to Hallowe’en series recently (October 2022), but given the Yuletide nature of the story and how much I liked it, I wanted to review/spotlight the tale as well…
M. Rickert/Mary Rickert has been gaining accolades and acclaim for her short fiction for the better part of the Twenty First Century, plying her trade largely in short stories. The fine folks behind Tor.com publishing have been providing an avenue for shorter-than-novel fiction for about five years now. Those two threads bring us to Lucky Girl, How I Became A Horror Writer: A Krampus Story published in October 2022. Five strangers meet at a diner during Christmas and agree to meet the following Christmas for a simple gift exchange with a caveat: each gift must be something thieved.
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.
The story is told by Ro, short for Roanake, a horror writer. When the story begins, the five acquaintances (Adrienne, Lena, Keith, and Grayson) decide to pass the time by telling Christmas ghost stories. One person’s story involves the Krampus, although Ro decides to hold back with her story. She’s clearly got some darkness in her past she is hesitant to put out into consumption by these acquaintances.
A year passes, they reconvene for their appointed Christmas exchange, but after that the group goes their own ways. They were all somewhat lonely souls, as Ro indicates and she perhaps the loneliest. Years pass before they all get in touch with each other again and by that time, two have married and one has died. They gather again for a Christmas celebration whose discomfort leads to a creeping sense of dread. This is a horror story after all, and our protagonist is a Brand Name horror writer.
I can’t recall if I’ve read other works by Rickert, but this one impressed me very much. There’s a lot of punch to the tale and where the story exceled for me was in what Rickert didn’t reveal. Or rather, the restraint and measured revelation of character’s pasts and the nature of the horrors of this story.
This is by no means an uplifting Christmas ghost story, but it is gripping and rife with dread and tension. The only minor issue I had with the story was that for a horror writer, Ro was not quite genre-savvy to recognize some of the horrific elements she was experiencing. That in itself is a trope, characters of horror stories being somewhat unaware of the nature of the darkness plaguing them so perhaps that is what Rickert was playing with in this story.
This story is short enough (just about 100 pages) that it I may consider it an annual Christmas read. Readers who have enjoyed the film Gremlins and the 2015 film Krampus will likely find much to revel in within the pages of Rickert’s dark, holiday tale.
Recommended.
© 2022 Rob H. Bedford
Trade Paperback | 112 pages (with glossary)
TorDotCom Publishing | October 2022
