Don’t Sleep with the Dead – Nghi Vo

Here’s a pretty little novella to add to your TBR – especially for fans of THE GREAT GATSBY.

Thanks to Tordotcom for the gifted copy

DON’T SLEEP WITH THE DEAD – Nghi Vo (Released April 8th, 2025)

You can see my thoughts on the companion book, THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL, here

Book Description:

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.

My Thoughts: 3/5 stars

I didn’t know this was the sequel/companion novella to Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful – which was a magical queer reimaging of The Great Gatsby. While you don’t HAVE to read that one first, I think you’ll appreciate this book more if you do. Don’t Sleep with the Dead takes place 20 years after the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful and this time we follow Nick Carraway as he tries to live his life after picking up the pieces from that summer when Gatsby died.

The writing is mesmerizing and almost whimsical, and the author doesn’t waste a moment in this 112-page novella. Part historical fiction, part mythology and paranormal, part reimagining, demons, and an unreliable narrator to top them all. We get more lore and world building beyond the first book, and I truly can’t think of a character that was so unreliable and unbelievable. He straight up says he isn’t interested in the truth – so this one will keep you on your toes!