Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies

De: Lindsay Wong

Horror collides with dark comedy when a young woman signs her life away in the ancient Chinese tradition of corpse marriage to pay a lifelong debt in this subversive novel about class disparity, ambition, and the burden of being an impoverished model minority.

Locinda has a debt to pay—and the clock is ticking. Desperate to erase her mistakes and financial woes, she signs a contract with a nefarious company, Joyful Coffin & Co. Matchmaking Services, to be a bride in the Afterlife to the highest bidder.

Next thing she knows, she’s smuggled underground into the caves where her training coffin awaits. All that’s left to do now is submit to her fate and renounce her past life by dying a nameless nobody. Only one problem: A fellow corpse-spouse-in-training, Guanting, recognizes her as the granddaughter of Baozhai, a feared and revered Villain Hitter—a powerful witch.

As her deathly wedding bell tolls, Locinda’s haunted past becomes twisted with her grandmother’s, one that stretches from 1920s China to the Battle of Hong Kong in the 40s to New York thereafter. Across the generational divide, one thing becomes achingly clear to them both: You can’t outrun your ghosts.

Amid visits from unwelcome spirits, a rude awakening from her undead sister, and curses so vicious they’d make your blood curdle, Locinda begins to learn that secrets aren’t anything like a dead body—they scream to be heard, and refuse to stay buried.

Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies is a daring, genre-bending meditation on life and death, the societal and cultural expectations placed on Chinese women, and the deadly cost of living in historical and modern days. This masterwork in fiction cements Lindsay Wong as one of the most provocative writers of literary horror of our time.

©2026 Lindsay Wong (P)2026 Penguin Canada