James Nicoll Reviews

Nghi Vo’s upcoming Don’t Sleep With the Dead is the second work in Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful period-piece fantasy series.

New York is a perfect city for Nick Carraway. As long as he presents himself judiciously, nobody will wonder if the successful writer is straight or queer. For that matter, nobody will question if Nick is the man he claims to be… or just an ingenious origami figure borrowing the shape of a man long dead.

Decades earlier, the Carraways had found the prospect of sending their precious Nick off to the Great War abhorrent. In a previous age, the Carraways might have found some poor man to take Nick’s place. Magic offered a better alternative: imbue a paper figure with Nick’s memories and appearance and dispatch the paper doll in Nick’s place.

The Carraways did not foresee that the paper man might somehow survive bullets, artillery, and gas, or that Flesh Nick might somehow get himself killed on his way home from his Canadian sojourn. Result: a paper man dancing to a tune long silent.

The replacement Nick has lots to occupy him: a successful writing career, pursuing forbidden assignations without undue attention from New York’s cops, watching as the world goose-steps towards total war once more. Nick does not need a ghost from the past haunting him.

Jimmy Gatz — Jay Gatsby to his friends, lovers, hangers-on, and victims — died in 1922 [1]. The dark arts that provided Jay with worldly success came with a price tag, a ticket on the hell-bound train. Even if some demon hasn’t eaten Jay’s soul like a martini olive, there is no escape from hell.

So why does Nick keep seeing Jay Gatsby on the streets of New York?

~oOo~

In its way, this would have been an appropriate Valentine’s Day review.

My review of the previous book in this series, The Chosen and the Beautiful, is here. Readers new to this series, particularly those unfamiliar with The Great Gatsby, would do well to review The Great Gatsby. It’s not long and it is free on Project Gutenberg.

The characters in this secondary world sequel to a re-imagined Great Gatsby may be homunculi, devils, and worse but none of them are as awful as the Buchanans because really, how could they be?

Obligatory world-building observation: a world with magic seems pretty unlikely to end up looking just like ours. If nothing else, the ability to make paper replicas of soldiers isn’t something the High Command would have failed to exploit. Yeah, yeah, this isn’t a simulationist narrative and should not be read that way.

There are two obvious questions about the Carraways’ Paper Nick plan.

• What would they do if Paper Nick died in Europe. How would they explain Flesh Nick’s survival?
• What would they do if both Paper and Flesh Nick survived?

OK, these are rich people so the answer to the second is probably that they were planning on killing the spare as soon as it was no longer needed. Paper is disposable, after all.

A more important question: what responsibility does Paper Nick have for the reprehensible actions taken by his flesh original? Paper Nick can access an old Flesh Nick memory of a particularly heinous affront done out of boredom and his sense of invulnerability — but that was the action of a dead man. Should Paper Nick feel guilty for something that Flesh Nick did? 

He does discover that he can be blackmailed for the crime.

Readers who don’t care about any of the above stuff, don’t worry. Vo’s artfully told tale about Nick’s possible guilt, and his efforts to discover what really happened to Jay after Jay died and who is wearing Jay’s face while stalking him, will keep the reader’s attention.

Don’t Sleep with the Dead is available here (MacMillan), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Bookshop US), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Words Worth Books).

1: I think of The Great Gatsby as taking place in a time so far away as to be ancient history but… it’s a reasonable bet that many of the characters could have lived well into the 1960s and 1970s. A lucky few could have lived to the 1990s. Imagine hearing the life story of a hundred-year-old Daisy Buchanan. Imagine the carnage she must have left in her wake.