Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies

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.

LINDSAY WONG is the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling memoir The Woo-Woo, which was a finalist for Canada Reads 2019 and won the 2019 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize. Her book of short stories Tell Me Pleasant Things About Immortality was shortlisted for the BC and Yukon Jim Deva Prize for Writing that Provokes. She has written a YA novel entitled My Summer of Love and Misfortune. Wong holds a BFA in creative writing from the University of British Columbia and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Winnipeg.

ISBN: 9780735242418
Format: Paperback
Pages: 400
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: January 13, 2026

Praise for Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies:

“Genre defying and brilliant. Lindsay Wong’s latest had me at once cackling and thinking deeply about the absurdity of the rituals we blindly follow to assuage our guilt, grief, and vain desires. A masterful feminist critique of the value of women, the commercialism of objectification even in the afterlife, and a commentary on how shallow pettiness and obsession with indebtedness and fairness can shape relationships. It is a gross and wonderful ghost story with dialogue and occurrences of bad luck that hit home in an oddly relatable way.”

—Jamie Chai Yun Liew, author of the Canada Reads–shortlisted Dandelion

“Villain Hitting for Vicious Little Nobodies glitters like an ominous jewel. Lindsay Wong creates a deliriously enthralling gothic tale of a dysfunctional family of women who do what they need to do to survive and are punished for it. Filled with morbid humour and piercing insight, Wong’s writing sings. It howls. Locinda and her grandmother, Baozhai, are gorgeous and gruesome; tender and cruel. They are perfect mirrors through which to reckon with our own unsettling contradictions and complexities. I know they will revisit me on my next dark night of the soul. And I’ll be glad for their company.”

—Hollay Ghadery, author of Widow Fantasies