Lindsay Wong (Shimon Karmel)

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies, the debut adult novel from Winnipeg writer Lindsay Wong (author of the acclaimed memoir and Canada Reads finalist The Woo-Woo), opens with a moment that is at once casual and shocking: “Exactly twenty-six hours after we sign the contract, we practice dying together.”

Readers are immediately immersed in the primary narrator’s voice and her unusual circumstances: Locinda Lo is in her mid-20s, a broke Columbia MFA dropout who has “fled” to Vancouver, where she barely makes enough money to pay the $1,500 monthly rent on the East Van house she shares with six roommates. As she says, “If someone had told me that my fate was to end up a broke, desperate, mildly wrinkled (unable to afford Botox) millennial, I would call them a jealous hag auntie and spit into their $15 glass of chardonnay.”

It’s not just millennial angst, though: her grandmother and sister are in peril, and Locinda only has 42 days to earn enough money to pay for their safety from a Chinese Triad. Seemingly without any alternative, Locinda signs a contract with Joyful Coffin & Co., a matchmaking corporation, to be buried alive as a corpse spouse to a dead groom from a wealthy family, with her bride price paid to her surviving family.

“What did it say in the absurdist scheme of things that I’m worth more dead to society than living?”

It would be less disturbing if the idea of a “corpse spouse” was the stuff of fictional nightmares, but this is not the case. As Wong writes in her author’s note, “During the Tang dynasty (618–907 CE), a belief took shape—one that is still widely held today in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, and Taiwan, among other regions in Asia—that no person (no matter their circumstance, age, or preference) should die unmarried, as it is considered a curse on the family. To prevent severe misfortune from befalling surviving family members, single individuals are often buried involuntarily with a stranger to become husband and wife in the afterlife. … In China, corpse trafficking, or murdering marginalized women for their bodies, is still very common.”

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies follows Locinda through her training weeks in the sacred caves of Joyful Coffin’s training facility, a grotesque and horrifying blur of mock burials, near starvation, institutional violence, mysterious deaths, and possible escapes, all overseen by the Aunties and Uncles of Love Death, who are more akin to prison guards than guides.

Locinda’s narrative voice is bitter and mean-spirited, but keenly observant and wryly funny; the (many) moments of humour (if not outright hilarity) somehow exacerbate the dystopian nature of the world in which she finds herself. This satire of late-stage capitalism is the stuff of nightmares.

Threaded through Locinda’s story is another narrative voice, which recounts both Locinda’s life (there is considerable focus on her relationship with her sister, about which the less revealed here, the better) and the life of her Chinese-born grandmother, Baozhai, a “Villain Hitter,” trained for and gifted at placing curses. Beginning in China in the 1920s, Baozhai’s life is an odyssey; her renown – and infamy – spans decades and continents, extending even into the caves where Locinda is held. As readers learn more about the family, the secrets deepen, and the novel’s mysteries – including the Triad’s involvement in Locinda’s terminal choice – begin to curl back around themselves, every answer serving to deepen the questions.

The novel as a whole is a wondrously mind-bending, richly rendered journey through time and space and back and forth across the boundaries between life and death. In lesser hands the novel could have been an overstuffed, confusing mess; instead, Wong demonstrates a cool control over even the most outrageous elements of her storytelling with exquisitely wrought prose, mordant humour, and a keen eye for both telling details and sprawling mythologies. A vital, utterly unexpected novel, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is a fresh and riotous gift of fiction.