Warning: major spoilers for “Immortal Longings” and minor spoilers for “Vilest Things;” if you plan to read either of these books, continue at your own risk
“Vilest Things,” Chloe Gong’s hotly anticipated follow-up to the New York Times bestselling “Immortal Longings,” needed to meet a high bar. Like any second book in a trilogy, “Vilest Things” had to deepen the plot and character developments it had set up at the end of “Immortal Longings,” sustain the readers’ interest for the trilogy’s conclusion, and on top of that, stand as a complete book on its own. Unfortunately, “Vilest Things” fell prey to these challenges, showcasing none of the freshness of Gong’s debut nor the sophistication of her more recent novels.
In “Immortal Longings,” Gong introduced the twin cities of San-Er, a city rife with political dangers and people who can “jump” between bodies–people like Anton and Calla, two indomitable players in an annual game for endless wealth. Calla is an exiled princess fighting for a chance to kill the king for good this time, while Anton hopes to secure the money necessary to pay off the medical bills of his lover, Otta Avia, who’s stuck in a coma. Whether through fate, or the series of strange murders that makes the game riskier than ever, Calla and Anton are brought together as reluctant allies.
When Calla and Anton face off in a fight to the death as the only remaining players in the game, Calla fights for San-Er, killing both Anton and the king, but, in the split second before his death, Anton jumps into the body of the prince, who had been watching the arena from above. Meanwhile, Otta Avia, once a formidable force of her own, wakes up in her hospital bed.
It’s here that “Vilest Things” begins: with Calla trapped amongst new enemies, San-Er under the control of a new king, and a dangerous antagonist on the horizon. Calla and Anton are again reluctant allies, if only because uncivil interactions would harm both of them politically. At the same time, Otta Avia worms her way into palace politics as mysterious deaths and freezing spells occur throughout the countryside.
This sequel has a more folkloric emphasis than its technologically-driven, dystopian predecessor, as Gong delves into the religious customs and myths of rural society in her imagined world. In fact, Gong expands greatly on the worldbuilding she began in Immortal Longings,” introducing numerous exceptions to the magic system of “jumping.”
This is perhaps the first signifier of a weakness that plagues the entire novel: adding plot devices and tidbits of knowledge rather than deepening what has already been established. It’s telling that the plot twists Gong is known for lack emotional depth, when Gong has so much emotion to mine after Anton and Calla are faced with Calla’s ruthless betrayal at the end of book one.
Gong’s writing seems like a stale imitation of her strongest. As usual, her dialogue is snappy and adeptly matches each character’s personality; her prose is almost unnoticeable in its level of polish, avoiding convoluted metaphors and clunky descriptions. But her characters fail to mesh with the plot she’s set them up with.
In “Immortal Longings,” Calla was set on fighting for the greater good of San-Er, even at the cost of Anton’s life, but in this follow-up, she makes a minimal effort to dethrone Anton or investigate Otta Avia’s villainous past, aside from picking petty arguments. There’s little reference to her traumatic backstory, which would continue to influence her sense of identity in San-Er, or the complicated emotions involved in her betrayal of Anton, which would influence her actions regarding Anton and his former lover, Otta. Surface-level jealousy and a vague determination to restore San-Er characterize Calla in this book, rather than action.
Similarly, Anton has no real plans with the throne that he’s acquired being in the prince’s–now king’s–body. His lackluster anger with Calla and frustration with Otta’s attempts to control him do nothing for his character’s motivation.
In fact, throughout the novel, both Calla and Anton lack clear motivation and seem to only stay together for Gong’s plot purposes. Even their past romantic entanglement doesn’t influence their decisions as strongly as it should, because Gong never fully examines the emotional repercussions of Calla’s “murder” of Anton on either of the characters or the relational damage of Calla’s actions. Their rushed reconciliation near the end of the novel is incongruent with their tumultuous history as literal mortal enemies, seemingly only placed in the novel so that the conclusion and the build-up to it are structured a certain way.
In this manner, plot reveals and political maneuverings take over what could be emotionally charged interactions between Calla and Anton, and even a broader examination of trauma and identity. Because of this, the characters are passive in their interactions with each other and the plot. Rather than spearheading high-stakes plans that would influence important events in the plot, the characters only seem to respond to important events caused by outside forces.
Indeed, the one character that doesn’t only react to the plot is Otta Avia, who even still is lackluster in personality. Gong continually “tells,” rather than “shows,” that Otta is dangerous, focusing on preserving the mystery of Otta’s motivations. In doing so, Otta Avia is a bland shell of an antagonist whose supposedly threatening dialogue seems performative.
Even Gong’s prioritization of the plot falls flat. Initially slow-moving, the plot quickly begins to be overstuffed as Gong puts shock value before even pacing. As the book narrows to a close, abrupt reference to events from the first book and before abound–both of which should have informed character motivations like Calla’s but arbitrarily ceased to be relevant to these characters after book one.
Additionally, Anton references the complicated friendship he had with the crown prince, even more so as the prince’s corrupt nature begins to be revealed, but again, Gong only describes the emotional effect these revelations have on the characters rather than showing the full emotional response of these characters.
Perhaps the most glaring weakness is Gong’s use of repetitive narrative beats and themes that structured her previous novels–namely, describing a city’s history as if it’s a person in multiple narrative cutaways, building mystery using a series of murders relating to the magic system, and writing numerous chapters from the perspective of an emerging antagonist with no initial relation to the plot. In Gong’s previous novels, all of which had been set in the same city, with the same characters, repeating these plot devices could be excused and even praised as techniques that added to the atmosphere and themes of those novels. But in an entirely different world, such narrative devices now seem uninspired due to their mismatch to the theme and characters of “Immortal Longings” and “Vilest Things.”
So as a second book in a trilogy, perhaps “Vilest Things” needed innovation more than anything else. Gong had all the literary experience to make this novel a stunner, but her half-hearted character development and reliance on the narrative techniques that carried her to success resulted in vacuous writing in a novel that could’ve been her strongest.
