In one sense, I'm not the target audience for this novella. It's a standalone companion to 'The Chosen and the Beautiful', a full-length novel by Nghi Vo that applies a demonic fantasy layer to a reimagining of 'The Great Gatsby'. I haven't read 'The Chosen and the Beautiful', though I seem to have bought two separate copies of it recently, and I have to admit that I haven't even read 'The Great Gatsby'. Hey, I'm English so that's not quite as heretical as it would be if I was American.

However, in another sense, I'm absolutely the target audience for this novella. That's because I've read two books by Nghi Vo and absolutely adored them. 'Siren Queen' was the best book I read in 2023, hands down. 'The City in Glass' was the runner-up for the best book I read in 2024, after Nathan Ballangrud's 'Crypt of the Moon Spider' and it was a close call between them. I'm very much a fan of Nghi Vo's style, looking at history with a sense of lyrical mythology. She has a unique approach to fantasy and her prose is rich and heady stuff, the two aspects combining to bring us things that we have never read before.

So I dived into this when TorDotCom sent a copy over and found it just as powerfully written as her other books. It's surreal and delightfully dark with intense imagery; even if, like me, you're completely without context as to who and what and why. I'm utterly sure that I missed depths in it that would come clear after reading 'The Chosen and the Beautiful', which I certainly plan to do. The question is whether it's a must or not. This claims to be a standalone story but there is a grounding that would be helpful.

The central character here isn't Jay Gatsby but Nick Carraway. As the novella begins, he's one of a number of gay New Yorkers caught in a police roundup in Prospect Park. It's the eve of World War II in Europe and New York's finest have every intention of beating these gay men to death, or at least somewhere very close to it. Nick is saved by a mysterious man who may well have set the alley on fire to get him out. Was that Jay Gatsby? He thinks it may well have been, but he's supposed to be dead and for some time.

Outside of Prospect Park, he's a novelist and ex-soldier, but he's not really Nick Carraway. In the language of the book, he's a paper soldier, which means that he went to war for someone else, as someone else. The real Nick Carraway is a rich man's son who got out of going by having him, whatever his real name is, take his place. Ironically, the real Nick Carraway died anyway, which leaves this paper Nick Carraway his name and his life. Mostly that's a good thing for him.

Initially I took all this to be literal. He's a paper soldier because someone forged documents. It seems entirely reasonable. So I took the Gates to be a fashionable nightclub and the slit-throat demon there to be a man in a costume. The Agents of Hell are euphemisms and deals with the devil metaphors. However, as the book ran on, I started to realise that "paper magic ran in her blood" was meant to be literal. Magic is real in this world and so are demons. The Gates are the Gates to Hell. The Agents of Hell are exactly that, so are deals with the devil, which are binding, and that slit-throat demon is, well, a demon with a slit throat.

So I had to reevaluate everything I'd read thus far, but that's OK. Like I said, this is a standalone story but it isn't really where we should start. I don't know if we really need to read 'The Great Gatsby' first and I have a feeling that we don't, but I would bet money that I wouldn't have had to reevaluate everything had I read 'The Chosen and the Beautiful' first. That grounding isn't a must but it's likely to help quite a bit because most of what works best here is truly surreal.

Now, there are sections that aren't and they work too. At one point Nick finds himself set up as the victim of a blackmail threat, because the real Nick Carraway had raped a girl when he was a young man and now that's reflecting on him because he's Nick Carraway now. Nothing in that is surreal or supernatural, well, until it is, but it's powerful stuff anyway.

But the sections that are surreal and supernatural are utterly majestic and they're everything I want from Nghi Vo. At one point, Carraway has to venture under the Queens General Hospital in Hillcrest and finds that it takes him beyond what Lovecraft would call Euclidean geometry to encounter living tiles with eyes, a woman made out of wax and another lady emerging from the ceiling above her. They deal in something under his shirt. It's dreamlike until it's nightmarish. It touches on deep mythology about which we know nothing and Carraway not much more. This is dangerous uncharted ground and we know that demons can't be trusted.

Of course, while this is all about Nick Carraway, who seems to me on the basis of this standalone companion volume only to be an analogue for F. Scott Fitzgerald who wrote 'The Great Gatsby' from life, just like Richard Upton Pickman and his paintings. However, Carraway himself would tell us that it's all about Jay Gatsby, who is the MacGuffin at the heart of the book, and yes, he shows up now and again to keep things moving along nicely. How it all ends up works from the standpoint of this book but I have no idea yet how it'll seem to anyone who's read 'The Chosen and the Beautiful'.

So, not being the target audience for this novella, I loved it anyway. I may not have understood all of it and I'm sure I didn't grasp everything I should have grasped because I hadn't read 'The Chosen and the Beautiful'. However, being the target audience for anything that Nghi Vo puts her name to, I'm even more in awe of her talent. This is as unlike 'Siren Queen' as it is 'The City in Glass', though the former doesn't take place too far away in historical time from this. That's three exquisite books that are thoroughly different from each other. At this point, I think I'd be happy reading Nghi Vo's shopping list. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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