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Book Reviewed by:From award-winning author Nghi Vo comes Don't Sleep with the Dead, a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her acclaimed reimagining of The Great Gatsby.
Nick Carraway―paper soldier and novelist―has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He's good at watching, and he's even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he's forgotten the events of that summer in 1922.
On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone's been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face at a club one night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn't done with him.
In all paper there is memory, and Nick's ghost has come home.
There are also people who swap faces, hearts ripped out and replaced by paper surrogates, demons, Agents of Hell, etc. The result is confusing and underdeveloped: the book aims for a unique world, but lacks the worldbuilding necessary to fully support it. Nghi Vo counters this shortcoming with fully controlled prose. Her sentences are balanced and precise, and with elegant pacing she manages to convey the emotional states of her characters, especially the narrator, with well-executed moments of beauty and emotional intensity. Don't Sleep with the Dead is ambitious and sometimes beautiful, an interesting choice for fans of fantasy and queer fiction, but ultimately uneven. It tries to channel the spirit of The Great Gatsby while building something entirely new, and in the process it loses clarity and cohesion.
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