Excerpted from LUCKY SEED by Justinian Huang:
Houyi was unable to see his reflection in mirrors, let alone any flat 2D image, so he always just presumed he was a very short, very wealthy human. He certainly had lived like one.
Born to albino purebreds atop a grassy cliff overlooking the craggiest beaches in Malibu, Houyi was the son that Roses Sun had been awaiting all her life. Her obsessive fussing over this pit bull dominated her direct family for more than a decade. He was treated like more than human actually, more like “the living god of some prosperous country,” as Cristiano often remarked, not without a bit of envy.
Houyi certainly got to go through the same general motions as the humans, if not better—sitting at the dining table on his designated seat next to Roses, riding his personal doggy elevator from her bedroom to the kitchen, chilling in his custom massage chair under the sunniest window in the sitting room. Why would he assume he was any different from the rest of his family?
The dog was wrong about his identity, but despite existing primarily in one percent settings, Houyi did somehow innately understand that he was privileged. Each time he waved his paws about and was given his favorite snack—freeze- dried Alaskan elk livers—there was a wounded wolf deep in his DNA that knew . . . it should not be this easy.
Some process their privilege by bettering the world around them. Young Houyi processed his by going apeshit.
He was a maniacal puppy with the muscle mass of a killing machine. By the time he was one, he weighed nearly one hundred pounds, and he showed no signs of slowing down. He could jump. There were many videos of Houyi getting so excited to see someone that he catapulted himself into their face, crotch first. His baseline energy level was a fully cocked jack-in- the- box; his max was Doom nightmare level.
He was a gleeful tyrant. The Malibu compound was completely redesigned around his convenience, but also for general damage control, with the easily scratched rare marble flooring covered with Persian rugs in rotation, all destined to be shredded, as well as every valuable firmly glued in its place. With his piercing electric-blue eyes and his unblemished snowy fur, young Houyi presented most often as a pale blizzard, blithely unbothered by his pathways of destruction as he barreled from room to room.
April, Cristiano, and Roses’s then-new husband Teddy could do very little other than cower under this puppy’s reign of terror alongside their matriarch. But after Houyi nearly broke Teddy’s back during an extra boisterous walk upon which they came upon a family of raccoons, the three of them finally staged an intervention.
“That monster is going to kill one of us,” April seethed at her mother, “unless you neuter it and get it properly trained.” (April herself hated young Houyi with an acidic passion, though she refused to let anyone psychoanalyze the gender dynamics between her and a dog, for fuck’s sake.)
Though Roses would not admit to any of Houyi’s faults and certainly would not consider fixing him, she relented a bit when presented with a stern note from Teddy’s chiropractor. She signed the pit bull up for the best dog training school in the area, a hefty drive by LA standards to Ventura, but assigned his daily transportation to the rest of her family, since it had been their bright idea in the first place. Now the other three real humans were punished into chauffeuring the canine terror through rush hour traffic.
Ultimately though, it was age and fatherhood that tempered Houyi’s youthful chaos, both with his own multiple litters of puppies . . . and then with the arrival of April’s son, Lewis. Even Roses had been privately nervous about how Houyi would react to the arrival of her much-anticipated grandson—and April had been vocally insistent about banning him to the backyard until they determined if he would be safe around the baby—but the moment Houyi laid his eyes upon the newcomer, the transformation in the now-middle- aged dog was finally complete.
Houyi was as gentle with Lewis as a spring breeze, always nuzzling the infant and sleeping next to his crib, understanding innately that this precious child was to be protected. The family breathed a collective sigh of relief. April finally began to love her former rival almost as much as her mother did.
And when the tragedy struck, Houyi sat outside of Lewis’s empty nursery for a month, unable to be moved, silent and heartbroken, real tears staining his downy cheeks.
Nearly a decade had transpired since Lewis’s passing, and Houyi was now an old dog, the zen patriarch of multiple generations of his own noble lineage. His once-piercing arctic eyes had softened into a deeper and wiser cerulean, his platinum fur more coarse and scant, his slow steps around the house now the laborious and distant echoes of his former exuberance. Faded glory was his new vibe, as he spent his days lounging next to Meadow as they watched YouTube together on the big-screen TV.
But as of late, Houyi was beginning to suspect that something was a-paw. A dog’s sense of smell can detect more than physical scent, and Houyi was catching a whiff that something was rotten in the state of the Suns. Roses ran a strict household of predictable routines and daily rituals, so her pit bull was able to easily detect aberrations in his domain, and certain recent events had piqued his interest.
Just the other morning, he had been snoozing on the floor of Roses’s bedroom when he was unexpectedly awoken by the sound and smell of April as she crept inside. The sight of her unnerved him further: She was crawling on her hands and knees ever so slowly as though she were wounded.
The very next day, he and Roses had been startled by the sudden loud intrusion by Iris, who had barged into Roses’s office at work. Houyi always had a special appreciation for Iris, as she was actually the first person in the family that he had met; it was Iris who had gifted Houyi to Roses when he was a puppy. The bitter tension between the sisters in the conversation that ensued was so vitriolic, it gave Houyi indigestion for the rest of the week.
Just a few more days later, when everyone else was out of the house except Cristiano, Houyi watched from an upstairs window as April’s husband walked outside to greet Lola, unmistakable to Houyi as she always reeked of the exhaust from her motorcycle. Cristiano and his cousin-in- law had a brief but exacting exchange as she handed him something small and unseeable to a dog’s weak eyes, before Lola slipped her helmet back onto her head and sped off down the street. Houyi let out a silent but deadly fart as he wondered what those unlikely two were in cahoots about.
But nothing troubled Houyi more than the stranger in robes. Houyi was accustomed to the occasional first-time guest arriving at his compound, but the moment Roses answered the door and the new human stepped in, donned all in white, the most primordial stimuli in the dog’s instincts were triggered. As Roses greeted the young man, every hair along Houyi’s spine stood on end, and he emitted his lowest, deepest growl of warning as he glowered at the stranger. Normally Houyi deigned to give guests of his mistress the benefit of the doubt, but there was a certain doubtless quality about this person that alarmed him.
Yet the stranger was unafraid. Even as Roses was apologizing on Houyi’s behalf and trying to step between them, he strode right up to Houyi, and, without warning, smacked his palm upon Houyi’s face. Houyi was so stunned by the fearless brazenness of the stranger in robes that he fell back, unsure of how to react. As Roses and her strange guest walked past Houyi, the man in robes turned back to look upon him, with a small smile of triumph and a mysterious glint in his eyes. Houyi could only stare back at him.
But there was a new fire lit within this dog’s old blood. Somehow, Houyi Sun already knew what had to be done:
Kill this dangerous stranger, lest he be killed first.
Excerpted from LUCKY SEED by Justinian Huang. Copyright © 2025 by Justinian Huang. Published by MIRA, an imprint of HarperCollins.
Narrator: Telly Leung
Succession meets Crazy Rich Asians in this chaotic, darkly funny romp about the lengths a wealthy family will take to ensure the birth of a male heir from the gay black sheep of their clan.
The billionaire Sun Clan of Greater Los Angeles is your typical American family, with power-struggling aunties, emasculated uncles, scheming cousins, scandalous secrets and a fortune teller on retainer. But at the end of each combative day, the Suns are chained together with golden handcuffs, whether they like it or not.
Yet strange storms are a-brewing. Their matriarch, Roses Sun, is grappling with an existential crisis: she must produce a male heir that bears the clan's surname. She fears that if her generation is the one in which their esteemed lineage ends, they will be punished as "hungry ghosts" in the afterlife—an ancient but very real Asian superstition.
Faced with this terrifying fate, Roses summons her favorite nephew, Wayward. Believing him to possess the "lucky seed," Roses presents Wayward with a mandatory suggestion: to father a baby boy who will inherit everything. When the other members of the Sun Clan catch wind of Roses's plot, all hells break loose. Wayward's family will now clash like never before in an epic war over the future of the Suns…if there is a future at all.
Yet through the chaos, Wayward sees opportunity. What if he can leverage all the conflict into a solution for his problematic family? What if he can reunite the Sun Clan by healing them? And what if the tumultuous Suns can finally learn how to love each other for the first time?
LGBTQ | Mystery | Fiction Literary [ MIRA, On Sale: November 11, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780778387862 / eISBN: 9780369764720 ]
Born to immigrants in Monterey Park, California, Justinian Huang studied English at Pomona College and screenwriting at the University of Oxford. He is now based in Los Angeles with Swagger, a Shanghainese rescue dog he adopted during his five years living in China. THE EMPEROR AND THE ENDLESS PALACE is his debut novel.
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