Drawn to darkness

Spence

They say ‘write what you know’ — even if it scares you.

Lindsay Wong, a critically acclaimed, award-winning local author, is set to launch her latest novel, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies, on Tuesday, Jan. 27 at McNally Robinson.

The novel tells the story of Locinda Lo, a broke master of fine arts dropout living in Vancouver, B.C., who signs up to be a corpse bride to avoid financial ruin.

“In Asia, a family is believed to be cursed — not to mention haunted — if they do not provide an appropriate spouse for a dead daughter or son,” Locinda Lo, who has just signed up to accompany a rich dead guy into the afterlife, explains early in the novel.

Things take one turn after another from there in a genre-bending story about life, death, race, and class.

“I was thinking a lot about death, which is something you’re always thinking about if you’re raised in this culture — Chinese culture — and its ancestor worship,” Wong said. “I was thinking of choicelessness … about obsession and fear of death and capitalism. When I was living in Vancouver, I had six roommates, and it was impossible to make a living as a writer. The main character is trapped in that mechanism, too.”

Although the protagonist of Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies shares some similarities with Wong, the author is quick to point out that this is indeed a work of dark fiction and not memoir.

“I was trained as a non-fiction writer, so it’s natural to gravitate to emotional truth,” Wong said. “This is not a memoir, but it draws on a lot of things that have happened to people I know.“

Wong, a creative writing professor at the University of Winnipeg, earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary non-fiction from Columbia University. Wong’s 2018 memoir The Woo-Woo, was a finalist on CBC’s Canada Reads, and won the Hubert Evans Non-fiction prize. Her 2023 collection of short fiction, Tell Me Unpleasant Things About Immortality, also earned critical praise. Her new novel continues to explore similar themes as Tell Me Unpleasant Things, imbued with elements of horror, magical realism, and literary fiction.

“Hopefully people understand that, while it’s about Chinese culture, it also deals with universal themes of life and death and who deserves to live and die, especially with the rising costs of inflation and who can afford to make art,” Wong said.

While her two most recent books are dark and fall within the horror genre, Wong is among a growing number of BIPOC writers in Canadian literature who are using the tropes of horror fiction to write about their lives and the world around them.

“I’ve always been drawn to the darker sort of things in life — especially, thinking about what the world is today. There’s so much going on,” she said. “For me, I grew up with this childhood steeped in Chinese superstition and mythology. I read a lot of BIPOC Canlit. There’s a lot happening, a lot of Indigenous horror happening. A lot of this resurgence is almost a metaphor for what’s happening in the world. I think we’re doing a lot of what we can or can’t say in memoir.”

Having said that, Wong also admitted that things that go bump in the night aren’t exactly a comfort to her.

“I was always scared to watch horror movies as a child,” she said. “I’m one of those people who sleep with the lights on. I’m a chicken.”

Along with promoting her new novel, Wong is also hard at work organizing a conference on pedagogy and publishing for Canadian writers, which will take place at the University of Winnipeg at the end of May. The idea to host a conference came in response to conversations among Canadian writers, particularly BIPOC writers, who might no longer feel comfortable travelling to the United States to attend the annual Association of Writing Programs and Professionals (AWP) conference.

“We’re hoping to offer this alternative gathering,” she said. “(Besides), a lot of people in Canada even haven’t been to Winnipeg (to) see what it has to offer.”

Since moving to Winnipeg in June 2022, Wong has come to see that the city has much to offer writers.

“It’s like a perfect writing residency, if you’re a writer,” she said. “You’re sort of secluded, but it’s also a city. We have restaurants and malls! It’s another Canadian city, and affordable.”

The launch for Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies takes place Tuesday, Jan. 27 at McNally Robinson Booksellers at Grant Park Shopping Centre (1120 Grant Ave.) at 7 p.m.