An Empire Built on Body-Swapping: Chloe Gong’s Vilest Things

Readers expecting the conclusion of a Chloe Gong duology when you pick up Vilest Things, be warned! This second book in Gong’s “Flesh and False Gods Trilogy” is her Empire Strikes Back, her Two Towers. This is a very certain middle of the trilogy, in which many things happen, the stakes escalate, and nothing is brought to a conclusion. It’s the deliciously tantalizing volume of the series that will have readers shaking their fists to the heavens in frustration that they must wait (and eagerness for the final pages when they arrive). 

If you’re just catching up: Vilest Things is the sequel to Gong’s 2023 Immortal Longings, her adult debut. While Gong begins with a similar theme to her YA novels—the series takes loose inspiration from a Shakespearean play, in this case, Antony and Cleopatra—it’s quickly clear that the author has entered a brave new world. The nation of Talin is a fully fleshed secondary world with a unique magical system that allows gifted individuals to move their qi from one body to another, taking over both empty vessels and the occupied bodies of those who have weaker qi. 

Talin exists in the shadow of its war with Sica, the nation across its mountainous border to the north. For years, two ruling families governed the capital of San-Er, until the Tuolemi princess slaughtered her family five years before the beginning of Immortal Longings. That princess, Calla, then lived in hiding, biding her time until she could kill King Kasa Shinza as well, removing all the royals from the twin cities. During the first novel, she enters the king’s games, a murderous competition in which eighty-eight challengers enter and only the victor survives. Her entry is supported by Prince August, Kasa’s adopted son, who plans to take the throne sooner rather than later. Calla’s revenge ends with Kasa’s death, and though she has a gut feeling she’d prefer anarchy, she’s swayed by August’s protests that order is what the people truly need and that he’d be a better king in all ways.

What neither August nor Calla expect is the arrival of Anton Makusa, an exiled noble and August’s former best friend, whose birth body is held hostage by the royals, and who has entered the games to continue to pay the medical bills that keep his beloved—and August’s half-sister—Otta, alive. Even more unexpected, Calla and Anton, as the frontrunners, team up to eliminate the rest of the challengers, paving a path to both victory and betrayal. Even as they fall for each other, they know that only one of them can win, and neither is willing to give up their goal: Otta must live for Anton to succeed, and for Calla, Kasa must die. Without completely spoiling the ending of the first novel, things do not go well, and readers would be forgiven for expecting the asps to come out early as Calla sought her own end.

As Vilest Things begins, Anton is safe within August’s body, vying with his former friend for control, and Calla has been named August’s advisor. Furious with Calla for the events of the previous novel, Anton sends her to a far province—but there, she discovers what look like the remnants of a cult’s experiments with qi. Calla just wants to rest, her job done, but she lets herself become enmeshed in the realities of this new setting, and drawn deeper into the spirals of conspiracy that lie beneath the thrones of San-Er. When Otta awakes, it’s impossible to tell lies from the truth, especially as both Calla and Anton begin to suspect that much of what they’ve always accepted as truth is based on lies.

Gong creates a love language of violence between Calla and Anton, and it’s hard to know whether to root for them—they’ve both killed many, many people since readers first met them, and they seem to feel no remorse for most of it. They exist in that morally gray area of supposedly wanting what is best for their nation, and showing that by doing terrible things to people who may or may not deserve it. August and Otta are equally ambiguous figures, though their motives overall come across as less selfless—both of them openly crave power, whether or not they would use it for good.

Almost the entirety of the first novel takes place in the faux-modern, dystopian San-Er, which has bicycles and cyber cafes, but the weapons are more archaic and gunpowder is rare. Vilest Things takes Calla, Anton, and Otta into the provinces and the wider nation of Talin. Here they encounter rebels who can do remarkable things with their qi—things that should be impossible, according to the rules they’ve always known to be true. But then, they themselves have also done impossible things: Calla, readers discovered in the first novel, is actually an orphaned child from the farthest province of Rincun, who stole the princess’s identity when she was only eight years old. Where most people keep their eye color when they jump, only Calla is able to jump without showing her true identity. Anton shouldn’t have been able to jump into August’s body, either. Otta should be dead, having burned out her qi with too many jumps in sequence. And yet…

Gong does a fantastic job of keeping an eerie tension underscoring the entire narrative, as readers realize the worldbuilding established in the first book is built on a bed of lies. The magic and rituals introduced here, especially in terms of how those reflect the forgotten gods that the people of San-Er have long-since abandoned, makes the world feel richer, as if those details exist to fill in spaces in the previous book. They fit naturally, as if they only needed to be noticed to be true. Part of that success is due to the warmth of the secondary cast, Calla’s friends Yilas, Chami, and Matiyu, who seem far less ambiguously good than Calla herself. It’s easy to care about their fates, when their lives are dictated by the events of the larger forces around them; like rooting for Mao Mao to survive, it’s easy to hope that Yilas, Chami, and Matiyu will come out unharmed. On the other side of the equation, the greedy council members who served as the provinces’ governors under Kasa are almost entirely unambiguously wrong. (One exception, Venus Hailira, truly seems to care about the people in her province—and she has one of the more interesting subplots of the novel.)

Magical crowns, gods, and the ghosts of those who should be dead but somehow aren’t fill the pages of this novel—until everything comes to a point of no return, setting up what looks to be a terrible confrontation in the final story. There’s no way of telling whether the princess who slaughtered her supposed family will rise to the challenge, or see San-Er burn to the ground around her. And knowing the fates of Antony and Cleopatra, readers are right to wonder whether a happy ending is even possible for two such tortured souls—and whether they can dismantle a corrupt empire before they meet their fates.

Vilest Things is available now, wherever books are sold. 

Alana Joli Abbott is a reviewer and game writer, whose multiple-choice novels, including Choice of the Pirate and Blackstone Academy for Magical Beginners, are published by Choice of Games. She is the author of three novels, several short stories, and many role-playing game supplements. She also edits fantasy anthologies for Outland Entertainment, including Bridge to Elsewhere and Never Too Old to Save the World. You can find her online at VirgilandBeatrice.com.