When I was a teenager, my cousin and I were riding bikes down the long lane of his house. The corn was about eight feet tall; the stalks were a golden blonde with thick leaves so that we couldn’t see between them. As we approached the end of the lane, I squeezed the brakes. Nothing happened. Before I could think of what to do, I zoomed out into the two lane country blacktop and into the ditch across the road. When I stood from the crash, I heard a man cursing. Apparently, I’d flown out in front of his truck, and he’d had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting me. After a few seconds of him cursing at me and checking to make sure his kid was correct, he said, “You’re one lucky son of a bitch that I wasn’t distracted.” Was I lucky? Often, when we think of luck, we think of someone acquiring something, like winning the lottery, finding a $100 bill on the street, or learning that I shared a love of microbrews with the woman of my dreams. We talk about people getting a lucky break. Rarely do we think of luck as missing something. But it’s just as lucky to find free cash as it was for me to survive that encounter with the truck. People try to describe luck in terms of chance meetings: preparation meets opportunity or being in the right place at the right time. But these are after the fact rationalizations of fate tossing a coin and us being on the winning side. In Lucky Girl, M. Rickert looks at the long term repercussions of survival as luck. The subtitle to the book, How I Became a Horror Writer: A Krampus Story, details the narrator’s survival mechanism. But, as with all stories, there’s so much more than that. By the end, Rickert will have the reader asking if the narrator really is all that lucky.