New Times, New Hell: This is a very fun Chinese m/m modern fantasy rom-com novel.
The premise is that Chinese government policies discouraging supernatural belief led to the collapse of Heaven and Hell, and now reincarnation is run out of a little office using Excel spreadsheets of everyone's karma. The protagonist is a new IT graduate who's been hired to update their system by the surprisingly hot King of Hell, who keeps spending company bonuses on gacha games.
There's a lot of cute shippy moments and surreal humour about ghosts dealing with modern life. The surrealness was only added to for me by the cultural differences, eg "communism" was used to mean something pretty different to any definition of communism I'm familiar with. It looks a lot like capitalism to me, but the book is clear that capitalism is bad, so I guess not! I have no idea how much of this is deliberate social commentary, a lot went over my head and I'm sure a Chinese reader would have a very different experience of the book. But the emotions of the characters were always clear and I got enough of the jokes to have fun.
I lost momentum once the main couple got together and never finished the book, but had a lot of fun getting to that point.
I've put some interesting quotes I saved about communism/socialism under the cut for anyone who's curious. No major spoilers.
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