Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies by Lindsay Wong

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is a lot. Author Lindsay Wong knows it and so does Locinda Lo, Wong’s primary narrator. An ex-MFA student who never quite finished her degree, Lo has heard as much from her profs, who openly wondered about the relatability of her outré fiction and the likability of her spiteful characters, and from student peers, whose tender, tasteful sensibilities were discomfited by the operatic pitch of her chapters (never mind its bloodiness, anger, and gore).

The novel’s ‘a lotness’ is a cinch to convey via two plot elements alone:

• 1) Lo’s intense, destructive sibling rivalry with Samantha, her dead younger sister (a piano prodigy), who was reanimated with the spirit of a woman born in the 1930s and is prone to maggot infestations, sub-zero body temperatures, and cannibalism; and
• 2) Lo’s skyrocketing career in adolescence as a Villain Hitter—a sort of hired-gun curse assassin who relies on magic shoe-slaps and a vast personal reserve of bitterness (aka, “the unrelenting itch of rage she had never managed to suppress”) to sow misfortune among “philandering husbands, unrelenting mistresses, gossipy neighbours, and two-faced friends.” 

Plus—how could I forget?—as the novel opens, Lo is far, far from her hometowns of Vancouver and New York City because she’s signed on for a boot camp deep within a network of purgatorial caves in China’s Guizhou Province. There, she’s known as “Corpse Spouse 14” and may eventually fetch a price just shy of $900,000 CND (just before she succumbs for eternity in a sealed coffin beside her new husband’s corpse). Money’s the goal; thanks to Lo’s “fatal mistake” a few months earlier, her grandmother Baozhai, an infamous Villain Hitter (“a professional curse-monger who used to work on behalf of the Chinese mob”), and sister are really counting on the cash back in Manhattan. For Lo, a self-defined “vicious little nobody,” the extraordinary penance is fittingly outlandish—self-sacrifice in the form of a shared matrimonial coffin is almost poetically apt for Lo, whose business-as-usual includes a Mah Mah whose fatal curses are feared on at least two continents and a zombie rival. 

As a novel, then, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is no wallflower. And not for the faint-hearted. A blackhearted—and often misanthropic—comedy, it elicits a kind of shocked amazement at the ludicrous goings-on, frequent titters of amusement, and awe at both the pitched invention of the storytelling and the caustic—blistering!—satirical attacks on everything from white privilege at Columbia University to a long history of gender politics and supernatural belief in China. Instantly recognizable to readers of The Woo-Woo, Wong’s raucous memoir of 2018, the comic voice once again presides—imperially so—across the novel’s eleven electrifying sections.     

In the novel, “terrible things” are part and parcel, and, for Wong, laugher, sarcasm, and hyperbole appear to be the optimal responses to it. Laughter (said Freud) unleashes anxiety and, like whistling in the dark, it wards off feelings of unease. As a coping mechanism for absurdity and horrors, it makes total sense. 

Throughout Villain Hitting (her first novel, following a memoir and short story collection), Wong capably apportions her storytelling. There’s Lo learning to be a corpse in Zhong caves and wryly relating her experiences with “former nobodies” who hope to sell their bodies to pay off debts or appease parents. Before that, there’s Lo’s personal history—in Vancouver, then with Baozhai in New York, then back to Vancouver. A juvenile Villain Hitter she soon’s a drowning-in-debt drop-out and subsisting with roommates who are also “social leftovers.” The account of Lo’s grandmother—from an orphaned villager in China and gangster’s curse-sorceress to prisoner in a Japanese refugee camp (all before being trafficked to New York City)—astounds, especially because Baozhai might otherwise come across as a one-note character. As awful and harrowing as Baozhai’s experiences are, they serve the novel well by adding necessary gravitas and dimension.

In its bones, Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies addresses what Lo describes (with considerable understatement) as “complicated family dynamics.” Those sturdy bones aside, though, what innovation and inspiration! Unhinged, unfettered, unapologetic, it’s a novel with a stupendous story to tell and the vision to render it superbly. 

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.