Nghi Vo’s latest novella, Don’t Sleep with the Dead, reintroduces us to the character of Nick Carraway several decades after the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful (2021). The Chosen and the Beautiful rewrote The Great Gatsby (1925) from the perspective of Jordan Baker. In Vo’s telling, Jordan is a queer Vietnamese adoptee who belongs—and also, doesn’t quite—to Gatsby’s world of champagne, decadence, and magic. I loved it. I went around telling people I was getting rid of my copy of The Great Gatsby because The Chosen and the Beautiful was all the Gatsby I would ever need now. Even if you didn’t love The Chosen and the Beautiful the way I did, though, you couldn’t deny it was ballsy for a debut novel to reimagine one of the best known works in all of American literature. Four years on, Vo’s raising the ante.

Now a novelist and a society journalist, Nick Carraway has never been able to stop thinking about that long-ago summer when he first met Jordan, when he knew Gatsby, when the world felt bright and full of possibility. Gatsby has been dead for twenty years, so it’s a bit of a surprise to Nick to hear his voice during a police raid on the outskirts of Prospect Park. Afterward, Nick can’t quite convince himself he imagined it, but he also can’t understand how it could be real. Gatsby, after all, made a bargain with hell, and hell devoured him. But the possibility lingers, and Nick can’t help pursuing it.

Don’t Sleep with the Dead is marketed as a standalone novella, and I would argue that it isn’t, quite. I had to go back and reread The Chosen and the Beautiful before I felt sanguine that I had understood the events of this book (quelle hardship!). There are enough nuances, uncertainties, half-truths, and divergent viewpoints that readers will feel more comfortable with this novella if they have a recent read of The Chosen and the Beautiful under their belts. Vo certainly employs a light, artful touch in reminding her readers of the key facts we need to remember from the prior book—the circumstances of Gatsby’s death and Nick’s life, to name two—but this book is still better classified as a companion novella than a standalone book.

However you’d classify Don’t Sleep with the Dead, it’s wonderfully haunted by the books that came before it—not just The Chosen and the Beautiful, but the original Great Gatsby, as well as, perhaps, a version of The Great Gatsby that fits into Vo’s fictional universe. We’re told that Nick has written a novel about the Gatsby summer, and the book cover described is clearly the iconic Francis Cugat cover: “a pair of eyes with a runnel of green tears to the left, nude women curled tauntingly in the irises.” Of course, that cover belongs to a book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and not by the fictitious Nick Carraway—raising the possibility that the alt-fantasy universe of these books contains a correspondingly alt-fantasy version of The Great Gatsby, with demon-blood cocktails rather than champagne and Faustian bargains rather than organized crime. Throughout, Don’t Sleep with the Dead engages in a complex meta-textual dance that never allows the reader to alight on certainties.

Vo has established herself as a master of atmosphere and a gifted prose stylist. Don’t Sleep with the Dead is no exception. The newspapers report on “alliances folding in on themselves like the wings of paper cranes” as World War II looms; the streetlights, “electric, yellow and lifeless, [give] the street a dull sodium cast”; a door’s buzzer is “brassy, with an insectile accent to the ring.” It’s not just that Vo has a knack for finding the perfect word for both the mundanities of everyday life and the supernatural of Nick’s world; it’s the deftness with which she makes those same mundanities speak to the characters’ moods and mindsets. For all the elegance and particularity of her descriptive prose, she’s perhaps even more devastating when she’s using simple language to slice through to the heart of the book’s emotional truths. “Sometimes,” Jordan advises Nick, “you have to be someone different if you want to survive at all.”

(Can you tell yet that I loved this book?)

Twenty years on from the events of The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nick’s world is a very different place, the glitz and glamor of the twenties lost in the slow march to World War II. The mind-altering drink they enjoyed at Gatsby’s parties, demoniac, has fallen out of fashion, and, when Nick says “no one could afford that kind of thing right now,” it’s not clear whether its unaffordability is financial, moral, or practical—or some combination of the three. Streets and homes are now lit with electric lights, not the gas lamps and magic that Nick remembers from his youth. The Chosen and the Beautiful opened with a charm that allowed Daisy and Jordan to fly, an apt metaphor for the temporary, illusive freedom the characters of that book enjoyed around queer sex. By contrast, Don’t Sleep with the Dead begins by anchoring Nick rather than freeing him—he’s caught up in a police raid of queer men in Brooklyn, at risk of losing his freedom along with his career.

At first it seems that Nick has grown more cynical than the sweet, passive observer we met in the previous book. He knows enough about the world, at least, to advise one of the other men caught up in the police raid on how to behave in order to escape the worst of the raid’s consequences. As the story goes on, though, it’s clear that Nick’s sweetness, idealism, and open heart are still present in him, that there are few risks he won’t take for those he loves. Vo doesn’t allow this to be a purely endearing trait, though. From a visit to an old acquaintance, he learns something new about the original Nick Carraway, the one from whom he was created in order to save the original from the war. Only, of course, it isn’t new. It’s something he’s always known, and buried, because that was what the original Nick did. The almost-innocence that Jordan loved in Nick in The Chosen and the Beautiful has always come with a price; the difference in this book is that Nick can finally see that truth for himself.

As we learned at the end of The Chosen and the Beautiful—in one of the most quietly shocking reveals I’ve encountered in a while—the real Nick Carraway’s great-grandmother fashioned our Nick out of paper and gave him life, all so that he could go fight in the Great War in place of the real man. But then the original Nick Carraway died in a car crash, leaving only the paper replacement to live out the remainder of his life. All the things the first Nick did, all the prosperity and family and connections that shaped him, now belong only to our Nick. He’s a fresh start and a new man—and he isn’t.

In turn, Nick tells the story of his great-uncle Leigh, who traded faces with a poor young man from the river to avoid being drafted into the Civil War. At the close of the war, they traded back. Or else they didn’t, and the man from the riverbank kept right on living Leigh Carraway’s life. Nick doesn’t know, and we never do either. In this way, Don’t Sleep with the Dead holds as its central tension the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of wiping away past lives and past decisions.

Perhaps it’s this uncertainty about himself that gives Nick the conviction to keep trying to find Gatsby. We know from the prior book that Gatsby made a deal with hell, then died, which means that he’s gone, devoured, lost to the pits of hell. But Nick can’t live with that finality. He doesn’t believe it’s possible that Gatsby, with everything he was, and the ferocity of his desires, could simply be gone. Gatsby would never have believed it of himself, and so Nick doesn’t either. Even if Gatsby’s deal with hell can somehow be overcome, what would the price be? What would be the cost of giving Gatsby another chance in this world?

In The Chosen and the Beautiful, Jordan describes Gatsby as “a predator whose desires were so strong they would swing yours around and put them out of true.” Throughout Don’t Sleep with the Dead, we have to wonder if that’s exactly what’s happened to Nick, as he persists on his impossible, Orpheus-like quest to retrieve Gatsby from the underworld. Does Nick’s life belong to himself, or to the old Nick Carraway, or to Gatsby, or some combination of the three? Vo leaves space for all these possibilities.

In all its iterations, the Gatsby story is about the dangers of desire, about the human tendency to fix our hearts on the exact things that will destroy us. Jordan is sharp enough and ruthless enough to get herself free of the trap of other people’s desires. In Don’t Sleep with the Dead, we see that Nick hasn’t managed the same—but Vo asks us to consider if there is any true freedom from love. If there is, would you want it?