An eerie engagement

University of Winnipeg creative writing professor Lindsay Wong fully embraces horror and ancient Chinese magic in her first novel for adults, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies.

Even before the release of this very buzzy novel, Wong was a writer about whom there has been a great deal of excitement. Her debut memoir, The Woo-Woo: How I Survived Ice Hockey, Drug Raids, Demons, and My Crazy Chinese Family, was a finalist in 2019 in CBC’s annual Canada Reads competition — no small feat for a first book. She has also published a young adult novel, My Summer of Love and Misfortune, as well as a short story collection, 2023’s Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality.

Locinda Lo lives in Vancouver. Even with six roommates, she is barely able to scrape together the $1,500 a month needed to rent her tiny closet-sized room. On top of this, Locinda’s sister and grandmother are being threatened by a Chinese triad that is demanding an exorbitant sum be paid in 42 days in order to keep Locinda’s family alive. While combing Craigslist for fast-paying cash gigs, Locinda comes across the Joyful Coffin & Co., a matchmaking service that provides corpse brides to wealthy families.

In a detailed afterword and throughout the novel, Wong explains the Chinese superstition of corpse marriage, or míng hun. It’s considered very unlucky and brings shame on the family line for a someone, especially men, to die without being married. So families would steal corpses or, more disturbingly, buy or kidnap women to be buried alive with a corpse so that they would be married in the afterlife. The Joyful Coffin & Co. corporation provides matchmaking for corpse spouses, and a premium is paid to the surviving family of spouses willing to be buried alive.

The novel opens from Locinda’s perspective as she is living in a secret underground facility where Joyful Coffin & Co. trains prospective corpse spouses for the ordeal before them. They practise lying in coffins, knowing that at some point they will bring in a corpse for them to practise embracing. They are coached for interviews with prospective buyers and learn how to calmly and without fuss accept their fate. Locinda’s voice is viciously sarcastic, and makes a lot of the pitch-dark subject matter surprisingly funny.

There are other narrative voices in the novel, including Locinda’s grandmother Baozhai, who brings readers into the world of other Chinese supernatural practices. Baozhai is a Villain Hitter, a kind of witch gifted with the ability to cast curses on other people. She’s simultaneously disposably lower class but also feared for her considerable skill of villain hitting.

Her narrative begins in the 1920s and continues into Locinda’s present day, and centres on her time as a concubine in Hong Kong, the occupation of Hong Kong by the Japanese and eventually finding her way to New York as part of the Asian diaspora. The intergenerational trauma shown in Baozhai’s story sets a grim foundation for Locinda’s life and current predicament.

Another primary narrative thread involves Locinda’s sister, who has been brought back from the dead. It’s a testament to Wong’s command of narrative to weave so many different threads without any getting confusing, or for any of the supernatural elements to feel out of place.

Despite the magical and otherworldly elements, Villain Hitting is a grounded exploration of late-stage capitalism and the impossible choices foisted upon marginalized minorities within such an all-consuming system. The economic pressures and inability to gain any economic or social ground in Locinda’s story are not so different to the trials endured by her grandmother Baozhai, even though we’d like to believe societies have progressed beyond such cruel systemic structures.

Wong is certainly not a little nobody in the literary industry, and Villain Hitting fulfils the promise of her hugely successful debut and her other acclaimed books. She is one of Canada’s most notable writers, and this latest novel also makes her one of the leading authors in the horror genre.

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is a fascinating, grim, surprisingly hopeful and, yes, vicious little novel.

Keith Cadieux is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His latest story collection Donner Parties and Other Anti-Social Gatherings is out now from At Bay Press. He also co-edited the horror anthology What Draws Us Near, published by Little Ghosts Books.