“These Violent Delights” By Chloe Gong

Retellings of the classics are everywhere right now. Some are done better than others, and Chloe Gong’s These Violent Delights is definitely on the list of more imaginative takes.

I mean, it’s Romeo and Juliette… but in 1920’s Shanghai… with gang feuds… and monsters. It sounds like a mess, but I think it works, eventually. The Shakespeare Easter eggs are fun, and I’m all for a diverse story.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints about the violence levels, but it didn’t bother me too much. Maybe my sensitivity filter is broken or maybe it’s just something to expect from a story about gangs fighting for control over a city. The biggest chunks of gore in my mind come from the effects of the monster causing people to tear their own throats out. Also, the word ‘violent’ is literally in the title, so maybe that was the first clue.

Side note: It was a bit surreal to be reading a story mentioning masks and vaccines and contagion amid the COVID pandemic. This was published a couple months into the pandemic and was written before, so it was just kinda crazy to me, and caught me off guard a couple times.

I wasn’t as into this story at the beginning, and I think that’s because I listened to this one on audiobook. While it was helpful for pronunciation of names I’d definitely get wrong without hearing it, the narrator was whispery pretty much the whole time, even though it’s an adventure story. I think I would have loved this a lot more with a higher-energy narrator. I mean, I have a hard enough time waking up for work overnights, so listening to whispers doesn’t exactly make me want to listen to it during that drive. The ending packed high enough tension that I ignored the tone of the narrator to hear what happened next.

These Violent Delights didn’t quite live up to the extreme hype as ‘one of the best enemies to lovers stories’ for me, but I still enjoyed it and I’m a few chapters into the sequel, Our Violent Ends. Chloe’s writing is far better than I would have expected for a debut author, especially one so young. The fact that she’s 22 and just put out her second bestseller is bonkers and I’m extremely jealous… but not jealous enough to get off my butt and finish my own novel, clearly. Lol.

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