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SINGAPORE \u2013 In debut author Camille Chong\u2019s queer action fantasy Love, Gods & Sinners, two masked girls punch and tumble on and off rooftops across Singapore.<\/p>\n
They are not miscreant daredevils, but superheroes with actual powers. The rivals find themselves simultaneously repulsed by and drawn to each other \u2013 a dynamic that continues even after the masks come off.<\/p>\n
Chong, 23, is one of a growing group of young women here whose Singapore-set fantasy stories are being picked up by international publishers. Love, Gods & Sinners is published in June by First Ink, an imprint of the United Kingdom\u2019s Pan Macmillan, and already set for a sequel.<\/p>\n
At MacRitchie Reservoir where a climate protest in the book takes place, Chong says her starting point was simple: \u201cI really like superhero movies.\u201d<\/p>\n
The law graduate is a bona fide fan. When asked who her favourite superhero is, she takes care to clarify: \u201cFrom the old guard? It would be Iron Man and Superman.\u201d<\/p>\n
The one she selects from the new wave of heroes is, however, much more consistent with what she wrote: Yelena, played by Florence Pugh in 2025\u2019s Marvel movie Thunderbolts, with all her crippling self-doubt and generational trauma.<\/p>\n
Chong will not hear of the movie underperforming at the box office. \u201cI don\u2019t look at box-office ratings. I march to the beat of my own drum.\u201d<\/p>\n
Love, Gods & Sinners is, however, very much of the zeitgeist. In writing superhero protagonists Harper and Tia \u2013 respectively descendants of the shapeshifting fox deity and moon goddess Chang\u2019e \u2013 Chong taps the popular enemies-to-lovers trope, and multiplies that by several degrees through the girls\u2019 real and secret identities.<\/p>\n
The defining influence came much earlier in the form of the six-season superhero cartoon Miraculous: Tales Of Ladybug & Cat Noir, first released in 2015.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt had a really big impact on me,\u201d Chong confesses. \u201cI was writing fanfic about it. I really liked the idea of secret identities because then you have a love square. I really wanted to replicate that tension.\u201d<\/p>\n
The first draft, which she hammered out in four months after completing the A levels, was much more romance forward. Yet with each revision, especially with the process happening in her second and third year at University College London, the story steered towards the political, finally involving a conspiracy over a new energy resource called moonstones.<\/p>\n
This is a Singapore where superheroes have become guns for hire, including by the government. Harper and Tia are asked to question authority and the pitfalls of unthinking allegiance.<\/p>\n
Chong says: \u201cLaw actually teaches you to trust the institution, because all these processes are put in place for specific reasons. But it also taught me what to critique.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs I grew up, and also because I was in the UK, I started to ask more questions. It\u2019s a good message to put out there: that people should not immediately trust the institution, or at least they should know what they are trusting.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her book is a long-term dream that has finally been fulfilled and a kind of expurgation of hang-ups perpetuated by Western media. When she was younger, she wrote about protagonists who were white men in the United States, which she at that point knew next to nothing about.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wanted a Singapore superhero in a Singapore setting. That was the first premise,\u201d she says. Though like many younger authors, having grown up with the breakout appeal of K-pop as a matter of course, she is also aiming for a larger audience now.<\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of Singapore stories are about Singapore, which is obviously great, but I also wanted something that felt mainstream while still being in Singapore.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her sequel, which she has submitted, will be \u201cless rooftop heavy\u201d and more \u201cmall heavy\u201d, Chong teases, barring editorial vetoes. Harper and Tia who, it is no spoiler to say, become a couple by this first book\u2019s end, will have to contend with being in a relationship while working together.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was more fun to write because I could explore different dynamics. Honestly, if I had known there would be a second book, I might have prolonged the will-they-won\u2019t they,\u201d Chong says. \u201cBut we have very few established couples in fantasy right now after they get together.\u201d<\/p>\n
Enemies to lovers is emphatically not something that happens in real life, but Chong explains that the obsession is with the tipping point when someone is suddenly seen in a radically different light.<\/p>\n
It is a tension she revels in, and the confident debutante ends the interview by saying with a wide smile: \u201cTheir face is on your wall, whether you give them kisses or throw darts at them. It\u2019s fixation that drives both love and hate.\u201d<\/p>\n