Don’t Sleep with the Dead
This historical fantasy novella weaves magic, horror, and the glamour of New York City on the eve of World War II, into a creepy allegory of what it means to quite literally be made of stories. Nghi Vo creates an alternate 1939 New York City in which magic and demons roam the wintry streets, tormenting Nick Carraway—the fictional narrator of The Great Gatsby—with memories of his lost love, Jay Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s title character). In Vo’s world, Nick is the author of the celebrated novel and is himself a supernatural being originally constructed, Golem-like, from paper.
A cynical survivor of World War I and of the traumatic events of The Great Gatsby, Nick learns that Gatsby has escaped Hell and is haunting him. This outlandish premise yields a short but intense series of encounters with uncanny demons and eerie settings that Vo describes unforgettably. Nick must bargain pieces of himself to obtain the information about Gatsby he desperately seeks, and readers need to have a taste for body horror to be entertained by what he goes through. This novel will appeal most to fans of queer fantastical horror, with plenty of gore and non-graphic erotic longing to propel Nick’s journey into his own hellish past.
