BookBrowse Reviews Don't Sleep with the Dead by Nghi Vo

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Demons, queerness, and The Great Gatsby gather in Don't Sleep with the Dead, Nghi Vo's second novella reimagining the century-old classic.

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Fitzgerald evoked his most iconic character from the novel's title, but took a while letting him out on stage. For about 50 pages, the reader only knows about Gatsby what others say about him. Nghi Vo uses the same trick in Don't Sleep with the Dead: Gatsby is summoned before he appears, because, though set almost 20 years after the events of Fitzgerald's classic (including Gatsby's death), the millionaire has come back to haunt Nick Carraway.

Although Don't Sleep with the Dead is marketed as a standalone, readers expecting to dive in without prior knowledge may find themselves lost. This novella of only a little over 100 pages feels more like an extension of The Chosen and the Beautiful (2021), Vo's retelling of The Great Gatsby. Vo, a Vietnamese American writer known for speculative, queer, and revisionist fiction, weaves the supernatural into Gatsby's core themes. In The Chosen and the Beautiful, Jordan Baker is reinvented as a queer Vietnamese adoptee with powers. The subtextual tension between Nick and Gatsby in the original takes the shape of an overt romantic and sexual relationship. But while that first installment maintains the glamour and indulgence of the Jazz Age, this novella strays too far from its source material to remain potent.

Here there are no glittering parties, flapper dresses, or music. Instead, Don't Sleep with the Dead unfolds in the late 1930s, in a world mired in depression and on the brink of war. Stripped from the historical setting that gave Gatsby its atmosphere and context, it seems to cling only to character names and echoes of themes: it is no longer a reimagining, but the continuation of a reimagining, and it just doesn't hold together this time.

The setting, dark and gloomy, emphasizes the most explicit theme: the return of the dead. Ghosts are not metaphorical here; they are not memories hunting the living, but real ghosts, demons with claws and teeth. "The dead are coming back over here, haven't you heard?" Jordan says to Nick at the beginning of the novel.

In Don't Sleep with the Dead, Baker steps out of the spotlight and Nick Carraway takes on the central role, as in Fitzgerald's original, to be haunted by Gatsby. Only it's not Nick Carraway, but someone—or something—that took Nick Carraway's life, body, and memories some time before the events of the original novel. 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.

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.

In Fitzgerald's work, the past lingers like a fog: "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" is its famous last line. Vo's characters, too, are trapped—haunted not just by memory but by the literal dead. In this setting, the dream, elusive in Gatsby, is even more unreachable: "You're the American Dream, if the American Dream is a broken thing, smashed up on the side on the road and left behind by people in better cars with more secure fortunes."

These are Nick's words to Gatsby during their long-awaited encounter. As in Fitzgerald's novel, Gatsby's presence is constructed through absence and through the fascination of others: "I had been telling myself stories for a long while about Gatsby, and now I no longer trusted them, either his voice in my head or who I knew him to be." But where Fitzgerald gave us careless people, Vo introduces careless demons, blurring the line between metaphor and reality. This choice might have worked better in a fully original story rather than one tied to the shadow of Gatsby.

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. The result is a strange, confusing, and at times compelling tale that leaves the reader wishing for firmer ground beneath the magic.

This review first ran in the June 4, 2025 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.