Don't Sleep with the Dead

Hardcover, 112 pages

English language

Published April 8, 2025 by Tordotcom.

ISBN:: 978-1-250-36261-2

(1 review)

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.

Don’t Sleep with the Dead is a haunting, evocative continuation of The Great Gatsby set in the universe of Vo’s celebrated debut, The Chosen of the Beautiful.

2 editions

enne📚 reviewed Don't Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo

Don't Sleep with the Dead

3 stars

This book is a follow-up novella to Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful which follows Nick Carraway after the events of the prior book (itself a retelling of The Great Gatsby).

Nghi Vo's writing (as always) is incredible here, and I love the horror-adjacent worldbuilding here of demons and wax women and paper soldiers on top of 1930's New York. This was a fun read, but in retrospect the story as a whole was too thin for me.