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Gods and Monsters: Rupert Wong #2

Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth

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For a man who started a celestial war, Rupert Wong, Seneschal of Kuala Lumpur and indentured cannibal chef, isn’t doing too badly for himself. Sure, his flesh-eating bosses inexplicably have him on loan to the Greek pantheon, the very gods he thrust into interethnic conflict. Sure, the Chinese Hells have him under investigation for possible involvement in the fracas. And sure as hell, he’s already elbow-deep in debt with the Sisyphean gambling ring. But Rupert is alive.

For now.

Really, it could be slightly worse.

155 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 17, 2017

37 people are currently reading
326 people want to read

About the author

Cassandra Khaw

126 books2,936 followers
Cassandra Khaw is an award-winning game writer.
Their recent novella Nothing but Blackened Teeth was a British
Fantasy, World Fantasy, Shirley Jackson, and Bram Stoker
Award finalist. Their debut collection Breakable Things is now
out.

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5 stars
60 (31%)
4 stars
79 (40%)
3 stars
44 (22%)
2 stars
8 (4%)
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2 (1%)
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
Profile Image for K.J. Charles.
Author 65 books12.1k followers
Read
April 9, 2017
The sequel to Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef begins with a kind of MasterChef style competition involving corpses and marks off for the unimpressive plating of a penis. If that doesn't sound hilarious, you are reading the wrong review.

Intensely gory, visceral, eye-watering and often very funny stuff as Rupert staggers, kills, dies, is horribly mutilated, dies, plots, and dies his way through a complicated scam involving rival pantheons with the Greek gods, HP Lovecraft, the Chinese hell and British myth all tangled up. There is also a superbly disturbing cat.

Khaw is a wild wordsmith, wielding vocabulary as her hero uses a cleaver to blood-spattery effect, so these novellas are short but dense with text, plot and visuals. So many visuals. Do not read over lunch.

Also to note: These books about a man with his soul in hock to hell making human corpse fricassee have real heart, and not just sliced and pan-fried, either. Rupert's grief and loss are palpable, his stirrings of empathy to others strong and moving, and that gives depth and grounding to the extreme technicolour horror shenanigans going on around us.

Recommended to anyone who isn't still going WHAT THE HELL DO YOU MEAN CANNIBAL MASTERCHEF OMG NO.
Profile Image for Michael Hicks.
Author 38 books506 followers
February 15, 2017
Earlier this week, I read the first book in this series, Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef, and dug the heck out of it, enough to give it the full five-stars. Now here I am, giving the second book the five-star treatment and digging it even more than the first book.

Right from the outset, Rupert Wong and the Ends of the Earth, got its hooks into me with a fantastic opening. Cassandra Khaw kicks things into high-gear with a cannibalistic Iron Chef-styled competition, which I flat-out loved. From there, Rupert finds himself on the run and relocated from his native Kuala Lumpur to London, where he's pressed into service for the pantheon of Greek gods.

As with the prior entry, there's a good dose of noir-mystery musings layered in among the urban fantasy backdrop, complete with betrayals, double-crosses, and reversals. Wong, despite largely being a coward, proves to have some steel in his spine and is a fun anti-hero with wit and craftiness, and more brains than he lets on.

With her second book in this series, Khaw seizes the opportunity to expand on the terrific world-building from the prior entry and shakes things up nicely with this crazy fish out of water play. Khaw is a hell of a creative writer, to boot, crafting wonderful visuals alongside big-budget action scenes. She's definitely an author to watch out for, and with this, the third book of hers I've read, she's made my must-read list.

My favorite part, though, are the foodie aspects. Yeah, the gore is lovely and fun and all, but when you're reading culinary horror, you have some particular dark cravings to be satisfied, and Khaw nails that here. There's some good discussion of food and drink, of both the cannibal, mystic variety and the more mundane - both of which are highly welcome.

But that ending? Oh, ang moh, you must suffer the cliff-hanger tease for Book 3. Time to binge eat away the anxiety of waiting!

[Note: I received an advanced copy of this book from the publisher, Abaddon Books.]
Profile Image for Elena Linville-Abdo.
Author 0 books97 followers
December 1, 2020
Stars 2.5 out of 5.

I'm still not sold on this series.

There is too much of a mishmash of different cultures and pantheons, with deities and monsters of different cultures piled up together with no rhyme or reason.

Why is the Greek pantheon in London now? Why not any other European city? And why do we have Russian gods and monsters added to the mix... in London? I get it that London is an international city and that there are a lot of immigrants from different countries, but so can be said about almost any big city in Europe or elsewhere in the world. Why choose London and not Paris, Geneva, Rome, New Yorks, etc.? It's not explained.

Also, everyone is awful in this book, the gods, the monsters, and Rupert. There isn't a single good character or even a good human being in this story. All of them threat humans like cattle, good only for slaughter. I think this is the reason why it took me almost three months to finish a 150 pages book. I simply couldn't be bothered enough to care for any of them, including the protagonist.

I also find the almost casual description of gore and violence in this book rather disturbing. I understand that it is part of the story, but I guess the story isn't for me. I think I am done with Rupert Wong.
Profile Image for Jim.
3,095 reviews155 followers
January 24, 2018
not quite as amazeballs as 'Cannibal Chef' but that's just quibbling... this story takes up right after that one and keeps the laughs and gore (and dare-i-say eroticism??) going full bore... Khaw's writing style is so gigantic when she gets into the machinations and violence and ne'er-do-well... Rupert is awesome... he is funny and angry and wily and smart and flawed... the tie-in of the other mythological figures was at times kinda weird, and not in a good weird, more forced, or probably just less fluid and flowing and fitting as the Asian beasties... still, that's splitting hairs (or craniums or ribs...) because this book is just wonderful... i did love that the most vile and feral and threatening were the female deities, it just works so gruesomely... Cthulhu Gore Noir, sort of... i wonder what Rupert gets himself into next...
Profile Image for imyril is not really here any more.
436 reviews70 followers
June 23, 2018
I don’t really know how to review these. They’re impressive and fun and disgusting in equal measure; I twitch as much as I enjoy them. They’re hard to recommend but worth a look if you’re comfortable with squick and gore and entrails and unnecessary cruelty. And I’m not sure I am. They have grace notes and Cass Khaw’s use of language is eye watering, but... but.

I’ll think about it.

Full review

...having thought about it, I'm still not sure where I stand on this. So yes, here's me giving a double thumbs up to something that made me completely uncomfortable - how's that for a vote of confidence in Cass Khaw's talents. I'm in awe. And hiding behind the sofa for a while.
Profile Image for Justus.
727 reviews125 followers
April 13, 2021
I thought the first Rupert Wong novella, Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef, was mightily flawed (a murder-mystery where it takes the detective most of the story to remember "oh yeah, I can talk to dead spirits so let me just ask the girl who murdered her and why, oh that cleared everything up") but had a lot of potential with its Kuala Lumpur setting of urban fantasy, full of Malaysian beasties and monsters instead of the tired old European ones.

So I picked up The Ends of the Earth hoping it could fix those missteps and deliver on the full potential.

What a disappointment this turned out to be.

The first, and biggest, mistake Khaw makes is abandoning Malaysia its environs to send Rupert Wong to London where he's surrounded by all the same-old European mythological beasts that are so worn out. The novelty of the first book is almost entirely abandoned.

Then there's the plot: It takes ages for Rupert even to get to London. Nearly half of this short novella. There are all kinds of bizarrely pointless asides like the details of his flight (he gets into a spat with the teenager sitting next to him), immigration (including a cringeworthy exchange with passport control), finding his way to his lodgings (and the long segment where he asks directions from some London youths). Fiiiiiiiinallyyyyy he's there. And finds himself in the middle of what is essentially gang warfare between ancient Greek gods and a new upstart god.

Even though this literally has nothing to do with him and he doesn't care about either side...he for some reason inserts himself into the mix?!? I don't even know what his goals are. We get incoherent scenes like this:

No sign of the feldgeist or Hildra, no trace of Veles. Despite everything that had happened, grief clenches at my lungs, resolving into a memory of the Cat, drooping like a comma from Sisyphus’ grip. They’d been friends, all of them.


Friends? He met them 48 hours earlier! And I don't think he'd exchanged more than two lines of dialogue with most of them. Friends!?!

Just nothing about the plot really made any sense. There were no stakes. I didn't care. Greek gods win? Don't care. Greek gods lose? Still don't care.

There is one (small) saving grace to this whole thing. It is a pretty standard trope in fantasy that gods exist, and gain strength, from belief. TVTropes calls this Gods Need Prayer Badly. Khaw takes this trope and runs with it to its logical conclusion in the modern world. If belief is what gives gods power, then what kinds of powers are going to be running about in the modern world?!

The Cat grins wider. “You heard it here first: churches are dead; YouTube and Snapchat and Facebook are the new houses of worship.” To my surprise, I find I have nothing to say to that.


Unfortunately by the time all of this starts to unspool we are well over half way into the story and nearly all the goodwill I had for the story had already been lost. (The scene on his dinner in the hospital is nearly as long as the whole thing about "modern gods". Ugh.)

If this were a different story I think the concept could have been pretty amazing. lolcats versus Cthulhu versus Zeus versus QAnon versus alien abductions versus Buddha.....
Profile Image for R.C..
503 reviews10 followers
November 2, 2020
I love character-driven books, and Rupert is an awesome character that I'll follow through many books. Which is good, as this book is really much more about him than the first one.

This novella really capitalizes on the setting that was set up in Cannibal Chef. There's a lot to be said about this kind of horror-with-comedy, about how the perspective shifts quickly if you start seeing the collateral damage as people instead of set pieces - what DO you do? How do you deal with incomprehensible forces that are casually fomenting that much death? That's something that Khaw plays with a lot in this book: Rupert starts out as a cog in the machine, just doing his job, not his fault that his job is as accessory to murders and such, what's he supposed to do, they're monsters/gods/etc, all he can do is keep his head down and watch his back and spout one-liners because life sucks amirite? And the reader is meant to agree with that, to take on his hopeless worldview as they see Rupert get batted around like a pinball by his various employers. And that could have been enough to hang a fun book on, but Khaw instead added an entire internal plot that held up the mirror to Rupert, showing him who he is, and making him actually have to make heroic choices. It makes this a much more hopeful book than Cannibal Chef, and I loved it.
Profile Image for Myth Button.
121 reviews
November 18, 2025
Okay, so I made the mistake of not checking if this book was in a series, so I ended up reading this one before ever getting my hands on the first. But I'm glad I checked it out. Maybe reading the first one tomorrow will change my view of this one a bit, but for the most part, I really enjoyed this. The theme of combining work-related stress with a dense mythological world was an interesting enough premise, but it's the delivery that matters. This novel got right into the snark and sarcasm of that kind of stressful life while dazzling the reader with the world of the gods, partially with the same kind of attitudes coming from the gods who are basically acting like bad bosses. However, the novel has a tendency to get quite gross, and sometimes it works, and sometimes it goes out of its way just to be gross. As well, even though I know this is a sequel now, I would've liked to see more of the girlfriend anyway. So, this was a fun one and I'll definitely check out the rest of the series.

82/100
Profile Image for Harris.
Author 7 books40 followers
February 22, 2017
Gods, Conflict and Cuisine

As follow up to Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef, you might think cooking might be more directly related to the plot. As much as cuisine is an uncredited character in the narrative, this is much more about Rupert as a character, being unearthed from the Chinese and Malay divinities and thrown head first into the Greek pantheon (among others).

And, as to be expected, the cat is tossed amongst the canaries.

A lyrical and elegiac read with no small amount of plot twists and moments of sly grins and "oh I see what you did there" that has echoes of Alan Moore in all the best ways.
Profile Image for Muhammed.
28 reviews
October 22, 2021
Found it less interesting than Cannibal Chef since we move from the interesting and unique focus of Gods set in SEA to the Greek gods that you're probably pretty familiar with. The pace of this book though is even more unrelenting that Cannibal Chef and there's no room to breathe. It's got a few good plot twists but the lack of prep means the pay off seems becomes lacking,some of the twists feel like Deus ex Machina and the whiplash from it is appropriate because it goes off like train wreck. Still fun though and Khaw's visceral writing and wordplay are pretty much the only thing keeping me hoping there's more.
740 reviews
February 5, 2023
Rupert Wong, the cannibal chef continues his adventures.

This time he is loaned out to the Greek Gods in London, England.

He meets ghouls and vampires and seems to always be around death.

He must call upon “Bob” and the other spirits that live within him or in his tattoos in order to fight and protect himself.

He comes close to death several times but manages to survive and finally makes his way home.

Curious to find out where he will go next.

Profile Image for Nichola.
798 reviews4 followers
February 22, 2021
I enjoyed this and I think what carries the book overall is the humour of Rupert. His character is largely what makes you continue reading through the violence and gore.

Overall I think like I have read this sort of narrative before but I would really like to read the last book to see if my assumptions are correct.
Profile Image for Megan Hex.
484 reviews18 followers
May 11, 2018
Not quite as madcap as the first, but deeper; there are far more atrocities (and a lot more gore), and Rupert is doing all he can to object. I am really looking forward to more in this series!
Profile Image for Ivia.
450 reviews1 follower
August 26, 2018
A solid follow up to the first. Builds on the mythology, develops the characters, continues to be intriguingly gory. The third part is set to come out next year, I think, and I'm very eager for it.
Profile Image for Sadie Forsythe.
Author 1 book287 followers
Read
July 30, 2020
Note: I read this as part of the book 1&2 compilation.
Profile Image for Laine.
702 reviews9 followers
August 5, 2020
i want to read cassandra khaw forever.

also, all those endings.1> so delightful. so perfect for a rupert wong story.
Profile Image for Lace.
130 reviews
July 14, 2023
Who doesn’t love a cannibal chef you can’t kill? Who doesn’t want to follow his snarky adventures as he outwits the gods?
Profile Image for Storm.
2,324 reviews6 followers
September 21, 2024
Read this second book of Cassandra Khaw's Gods and Monsters: Rupert Wong Series for Reddit Fantasy's 2024 Bingo Square Survival. This qualifies for hard mode Rupert is not trying to survive a super virus or pandemic, but instead, he's on the run from parties desiring retribution as a result of some of his heinous actions in Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef.

Rupert's decision to "sell out" the Dragon King knowing what the Dragon would do (for revenge) and to kill a fury for his boss Ghoul's special dinner event, means everyone blames him for starting the celestial war. There's also the fact that he caused the Dragon King to be tortured indefinitely into admitting guilt for killing a fury (he's the obvious suspect, after all) because he is immortal and can thus suffer eternal torture. Yikes!
description

Unfortunately for Rupert, his flesh-eating bosses loan him to the Greek pantheon, the very gods he thrust into inter ethnic conflict. The Chinese Hells aren't idiots, the Dragon King's words have a ring of truth to them so they are investigating Rupert for his involvement, and the King of Hell, valuing Rupert's wit, gives him some advice in no uncertain terms, for his own good.
description

The next thing you know Rupert is en route to London, and other places, with the longest ass flight connections you can possibly imagine. This part of the book almost gave me PTSD because everyone knows what a "hell" flight is like, fortunately for Rupert he does have some special skills otherwise he might have gone insane stuck in the middle seat with other miserable passengers.
description

Unlike the first book I didn't connect as much with the London or other settings. The world building was more perfunctory despite the longer length. There are newer "Gods" in London, from history and myth, and again we have a new "war" brewing, one Rupert is caught in the middle of. I found I just didn't really care for most of the Greek Characters even though all were recognizable and a lot of it played out more or less as expected!
description

This second book being set in London was a lot easier on the ears as there were fewer Malay and Chinese words or names for narrator Jonathan Yen to pronounce wrongly so it didn't trigger my pet peeve. I still found it hard to like Rupert since he's an opportunistic survivor, and I didn't even feel sorry for him despite this book having many more characters who are even more morally reprehensible than Rupert, which makes him seem less bad in comparison.
description
680 reviews5 followers
February 23, 2017
Gory but good.

Ms. Khaw is such a good writer. In this book, I got a bit tired of wading through all the viscera and other assorted body parts being flung here and there, even taking into account the whole "cannibal chef" thing. But the story is great.
138 reviews
February 19, 2017
Loved it

Hoping the ending means we finally get a combined story. There are references to the other stories but it would be awesome to get a Wildcard like book with the different storylines intertwined. Rupert is such an amusing character and I love how he outsmarts entire pantheons.
Profile Image for Tetiana.
354 reviews1 follower
April 9, 2023
So gross and hilarious, but also somehow poignant and touching. I love Rupert and absolutely bonkers things he gets up to.

Seriously, so thoroughly enjoyable I couldn’t put it down.
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