I don’t know how Nghi Vo does it. This woman puts out up to two books a year plus short fiction, and every single piece feels like the best thing I’ve ever read. Don’t Sleep With the Dead is her first for 2025 (A Mouthful of Dust, the sixth book in The Singing Hills Cycle, is scheduled for October). As per usual for a Vo book, it left me gasping for air.
Despite being marketed as a “standalone companion,” this really is more of a sequel. I got halfway through before I decided to go back and reread The Chosen and the Beautiful, then went back and started Don’t Sleep With the Dead from the beginning. I got so much more out of it after my reread. You can read the second book without reading the first, but you’ll miss the references—all of which add depth, backstory, and character development—and the ending won’t hit nearly as hard. I read the ending three times, trying not to cry each time, and I can’t imagine having that same experience without knowing everything Nick went through in the first book. If The Chosen and the Beautiful is still on your TBR, consider this a sign to move it to the top of the list.
It’s hard to talk in detail about this book; so much of it relies on key plot points from the first book, as well as how the characters feel now about those events. Set nearly twenty years after the first book, this story follows Nick Carraway’s perspective rather than Jordan Baker’s. Nick is about as unreliable a narrator as it gets. What he wants and what he knows are often at odds, and Jordan is the only person who forces him to acknowledge that chasm. He is queer and biracial in secret, keeping those parts of himself locked away in memories or confined to cruising in parks. Who is the real Nick Carraway? Not even Nick himself can answer that… but perhaps someone else can. A violent incident with cops brings someone from Nick’s past into his present. Nick is forced into a position where he must choose, even if that choice is “I don’t know.”
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Don’t Sleep With the Dead
In The Chosen and the Beautiful, Vo remixes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic The Great Gatsby into a fierce story about racism, xenophobia, misogyny, anti-Asian bigotry, the patriarchy, queerphobia, colorism, colonization, adoption, and classism. I wrote in my review that “Vo does The Great Gatsby far, far better than Fitzgerald ever did,” and I stand by that (and not just because I dislike Fitzgerald’s version). Vo examines, critiques, and deconstructs whiteness and proximity to whiteness, allowing for a fuller exploration of the Jazz Age than Fitzgerald’s narrow, shallow focus. Much of Jordan’s story revolved around the passing of an anti-Asian immigration act and what that meant for her future in the United States as an adoptee who was taken (stolen?) from Vietnam. Nick’s story touches on the ramifications of the passing of that act and the ways he was able to escape it through proximity to whiteness.
Although Don’t Sleep With the Dead is not tied to a Fitzgerald property and doesn’t have the same dazzle and glitz as Vo’s first book in this series, it continues her same explorations. Moving those conversations to the eve of World War II necessarily alters the tenor of the questions and answers. Jordan’s move overseas felt freeing before, and now it feels ominous. Nick’s resolution was one of rebirth and opportunity that has now become a stagnant pond on an abandoned estate, a small world where nothing grows and the sun no longer shines. Jordan was forced by internal and external circumstances to shatter the life she had in New York City, so she picked up and built something new, if not entirely satisfactory, elsewhere. Nick, on the other hand, built a nest out of the shards of glass that was his life in that tumultuous summer in 1922. He cuts himself over and over again and can see nothing but the scars.
In just a 101-page novella, Nghi Vo does in Don’t Sleep With the Dead what few authors have managed in full-length novels. It is eviscerating and unforgiving, glittering and pensive. It is a story of longing, for your past, for your future, for your desires, for your fears. I fall a little in love with each new Vo book even though I know the story is going to break my heart, and this one is no exception.
Don’t Sleep With the Dead is published by Tordotcom Publishing.
