In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts

by Gwendolyn Kiste

Stoker winner Gwendolyn Kiste holds up a dark, queer mirror to The Great Gatsby in In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts, a haunting exploration of the obsession and control at the edges of an American classic.

In 1955, Daisy Buchanan is found dead in an abandoned West Egg mansion, but her daughter Mel knows she's really been gone for years. No one knows whether Daisy was murdered, or if it was a simpler, slower death: her yearslong spiral of alcohol, abuse, and helplessness. But when Mel enters the estate, she finds Daisy's ghost, somehow frozen at twenty-three, and a charming, bleeding phantom that used to be Jay Gatsby.

To free her mother, Mel must carve a path through family secrets and decaying revelers: deep into Gatsby’s starving house, as it gorges itself on unfulfilled love and grows stronger every night.

Genres: Horror, Historical Fiction, LGBT, Historical, Fantasy, Adult, Retellings

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2026

About the author

Gwendolyn Kiste is the four-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of The Rust Maidens, Reluctant Immortals, The Haunting of Velkwood, Boneset & Feathers, and Pretty Marys All in a Row, among others. Her short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in outlets including Lit Hub, Nightmare, Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vastarien, Tor Nightfire, Titan Books, and The Dark. She's a Lambda Literary Award winner, and her fiction has also received the This Is Horror award for Novel of the Year as well as nominations for the Shirley Jackson, Premios Kelvin, Ignotus, and Dragon awards.

Originally from Ohio, she now resides on an abandoned horse farm outside of Pittsburgh with her husband, their excitable calico cat, and not nearly enough ghosts. Find her online at gwendolynkiste.com

Reviews

[Johanna Van]

I blurbed this one!

"Clever, compelling, and creepy: In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts is the sapphic sequel to The Great Gatsby we have all been waiting for as fervently as Gatsby waited for Daisy."

[BookishKB · Rating 3 out of 5]

✨ In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts ✨

I can appreciate the attempt at a queer Great Gatsby retelling, but this one just fell flat for me. It felt too short to fully explore the ideas it was reaching for, which left the story feeling underdeveloped and a bit too fast paced.

🖤 What to Expect
• Queer gothic horror
• Great Gatsby reimagining
• Haunted mansion
• Ghostly mother
_ _ _
⭐ Final Score: 2.5
📅 Pub Date: September 15, 2026
📝 Thank you to Creature Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced copy. All thoughts are my own.

[Kaitie Reads · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook Read.

💛 Gatsby Pseudo Sequel
👁 Sapphic Rep
💛 Haunted House
👁 Carving New Paths
💛 Obsession & Longing

This was a really unique concept, but I wish I had enjoyed the story more. While I loved the premise, some details of the story felt a little jarring. It also has a very coming-of-age vibe, making it read a little bit more like YA than anticipated.

•

When Daisy Buchanan is found dead in an abandoned mansion in West Egg, her daughter, Mel, seeks to find out why she was at the mansion and how Daisy and Jay Gatsby both continue to haunt the present. Using familiar characters from the original story, Gwendolyn Kiste crafts a tale of overcoming heritage, sapphic longing, and the impact of obsessive love.

•

I felt like this novel both tried too hard and didn't try hard enough. The characterizations, for example, feel pretty well done. I, however, do not think that ghost Jay Gatsby would call Daisy Buchanan's daughter "old sport." While the emotional impacts of everything that happened during the events of "The Great Gatsby" reverberate through this story, it ends up feeling pretty juvenile. Like, Mel is a 35-year-old divorced woman, but has the emotional nuances of someone just approaching adulthood. Sure, this could be the result of her traumatic and somewhat convoluted childhood with her mother pining after the ghost of the man she lost, but it just feels... mediocre. The paranormal aspects were pretty cool, though; I think more of that and less of Mel's internal struggles could have drawn me in more.

Another detail that pulled me out: a town librarian and police chief reminiscing about attending Gatsby's parties. I just couldn't buy that lower- to middle-class residents were on those guest lists. They were meant to be glamorous. This might be the author's attempt to erase the class differentials? But it did not work for me. Gatsby's parties were for the elite; he would have never wanted to give the impression that he was fraternizing with lower-class individuals. IDK, I probably love the source material too much to enjoy the changes made to suit this novel's purpose. It kind of felt... corny.

I did love that it had kind of a sapphic spin, but I didn't care about Mel as a character enough to root for her, and the perceived love triangle situation feels a little bit forced.

The narration of the audiobook is well-delivered; it kept a steady pace, and despite not loving the story itself, I found it to be an engaging listen.

Overall, this wasn't for me, but other people might enjoy it!

•

Thank you to Dreamscape Media for the ALC of this book. All thoughts and feedback contained within this review are my own.

[Leonie · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ (4 very solid stars)

At the forefront of this novella is Daisy’s and Mel’s mother-daughter relationship. It’s complex, difficult but inevitably soo emotional too. And without spoiling, just let me say that this novella raised so many questions within me such as how much of our parents is in us? How much are we alike? How much of our past or the one of our parents define us and how do you learn to live with your past without wanting to erase certain points?
To put it mildly, this was veryyy emotional, even more so at the end. Especially because in the very end, it felt like I was reading a story which teaches me to learn how to let go, of the past, of people long gone and in a way even people who are still very much alive and mean so much to one but hinder us to move on in a way. And all of this, to get your own chance to live a life according to your own terms. Which is exactly why I would say this is so very emotional but also a really important read. Moreover, it was very well written and put together in a way that I wish it would’ve been longer and had even more detail. Though, I gotta admit, reading this almost made me nostalgic to read ‘The Great Gatsby’ again (haha).
Overall, I really really enjoyed reading this and I can recommend this a thousand times. It’s really sooo good!!

Ps: We all surely had a Jordan in our life, I know for sure I had one 🙂‍↕️

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free copy of this novella in exchange for an honest and voluntarily given review!

[Becky Spratford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review in the September 2026 issue of Booklist and on the blog: https://raforall.blogspot.com/2026/09... (link live on 9/10/26 at 7am central)

Three Words That Describe This Book: book about a book, immersive and visceral, reclaiming forgotten women (especially discarded daughters)

This one is a solid 4.5 stars.

More than a retelling, this is a horror novel that explores and probes its inspiration-- The Great Gatsby and creates something new. But it keeps the sensual, decadence and glamor of the original as well. It uses the source material to tell a new story. Similar to Reluctant Immortals but not as wide in scope-- both in the breadth of the story and length-- this is a novella that can be read in 2 sittings-- and you will want to do that.

Also I stand behind the word Visceral here but this book is not "gross" in a standard use of that word. The house-- Gatsby's West Egg mansion is a sentient haunted house, it can create corporeal ghosts out of its memories-- conjure them-- but it needs to feed off the living to gain strength. The more living breathing humans who visit from 3-4 am, the more it can feed and then do. So this book is sticking with the ectoplasm that oozes down the walls and sticks to the people. The ghosts it creates are in various states of building-- some are grotesquely missing major parts, some are rotting, some are just slightly, but very creepily off.

Let's back up a bit though. This book hinges on the appearance, very small, of Daisy's daughter Pamela in the source text (The Great Gatsby). Like Kiste does with all of her work-- she gives voice to the voiceless women in the world (whether they are of her creation or from other works of literature). In this case, she dedicated the book to "discarded daughters" and that is the focus here. Pamela, who prefers to go by Mel, is our protagonist and POV here. Kiste empowers her with her own story and her own happy ending.

Kiste also makes reference to the film version which readers may notice and if not, she tells you in the acknowledgements.

It is 1955 and Daisy has just died-- found dead at the West Egg Mansion of Gatsby, obviously long dead as readers of the course material know. Mel gives readers the view of Daisy after the novel. Washed up at 25 but living in the past to almost 60. Mel's life has not been easy and she grew up very poor knowing her family had once been rich. Once nice touch in Kiste's hands here is that over the course of the novel, Mel comes to learn more truth about her mother, Gatsby and more.

Mel is 35 but her whole life she has toiled and tried to earn her mother's love. Her mother seemed to only live in the past. Mel has a good job at a dry cleaner working with a woman who is her best friend but who she also has feelings for.

When she finds out her mom was with a famous spiritualist at West Egg when she died, this starts the horror action. Mel is drawn to participate in connecting with the ghosts who appear every night at West Egg to live an echo of the great parties from the heights of the novel. At the center of it all is Gatsby himself. But Mel goes with the spiritualist in an attempt to find the ghost of her mother. What she finds is a lot more than she bargained for, but it might be just what she needs to start living her life for herself for the first time ever.

Readers see immediately that the house holds a grotesque power of its own from the start. Mel feels it. The visceral things I mention above are key. The details are immersive. You are there both in 1955 with Mel (whether it is in NYC at her job and walking the streets o visiting the lesbian bar) AND at West Egg in the Gatsby pre cars 1920s and the abandoned decrypted house of 1955.

Fun thing here, Kiste makes Gatsby, his parties, and his death part of the world's history-- so Mel can go to the NYPL and look up news stories about it.

This is a story that probes the source material to move it into a future and tell Mel's story, but it also closes some loops in the original. It is also an immersive and imaginative sentient haunted house story. It is also a novel that gives the power and happy ending to discarded daughters and forgotten women everywhere.

I found the resolution a little too fairy tale-esaue and neat for horror, but I have read a lot of Kiste's work and love all of it. I know she doesn't usually do this so I know she had a reason.

Like all of her books and stories, this is impeccably written. The imagery is vivid, the characters come alive, the writing is beautiful (even when about gross things like a ghastly built body) and accessible. It is a joy to read and will linger with you long after.

I for one will never be able to look at The Great Gatsby the same way again. And that is a HUGE win. This is from a smaller press but totally worth a read by anyone who like Gwendolyn Kiste (raises my own hand).

For any readers who love to read original retellings of classics by today's horror authors but especially the way Helen Oyoyemi does it.

Also if you like this decadent and glamorous but still visceral horror of forgotten women getting their due, try Donyae Coles-- Midnight Rooms yes because a type of haunted house Gothic, but especially the upcoming (August) The Sunken, the Adored.

[BookishlySonia · Rating 4.5 out of 5]

4.5 I am not a fan of The Great Gatsby, but I loved The Haunting of Velkwood, so I decided to give this novella a chance, and I am so glad I did. Kiste managed to do something that all three of my reads of Gatsby failed to do: make me care about those two insufferable characters. In this retelling, we follow Mel Buchanan (Pamela) as she grapples not only with the death of her mother, Daisy, but also with finding her mother's ghost and putting it to rest, a journey that leads her to Gatsby's haunted mansion.

Kiste's prose is lush and poetic, weaving an atmosphere that is both haunting and melancholic. The energy of Gatsby's Roaring Twenties mansion is subdued by the more pragmatic atmosphere of the present-day Nifty Fifties, creating a story tinged with self-aware nostalgia. I found myself highlighting passage after passage, fully entranced by how beautiful the writing was. Even the horror, which features several incredibly effective scenes, is presented in a way that makes the grotesque feel strangely alluring.

While this is a Gatsby “retelling”, at its core it's a story about parental emotional neglect and abuse, generational trauma, obsession masquerading as love, and healing enough that the darkest corners of your soul begin to look more like shade instead. I absolutely loved how Kiste explores the complexities of mothers and daughters, as well as her inclusion of the real-life persecution faced by queer people who simply wanted to exist.

The romantic subplot is tender and full of love and full of queer longing. I will say, separately, there’s an aspect of an unrequited crush that is also present that I wasn’t keen on. I understand why it’s present but I am not a fan of anything romantic with that origin story.

I absolutely loved this book and cannot wait to get my shelf trophy!


PS I am not sure retelling is the proper word for this book. It reads much more like a continuation than a retelling.

[Cecily - MillennialBookGal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Gwendolyn Kiste and NetGalley for the free audiobook of this novel.

3.75 Stars

What a cute premise to bring back the characters from The Great Gatsby but as ghosts with unfinished business. Great for the spooky season.

I enjoyed it to a point but I felt like there wasn't enough substance to really draw me in and really engage me. It kind of felt very surface level and I wanted more, to go deeper into a plot with these characters.

Okay read.

[Bethany (Beautifully Bookish Bethany)]

A queer gothic ghost story drawing on The Great Gatsby, following some of the characters many years later. After Daisy's death, her daughter Mel is determined to uncover what really happened to her mother and what she was hiding. Along the way she ventures into the haunted and abandoned estate once owned by Jay Gatsby. It's an interesting take on the classic, centering a queer character. The audio narration is pretty good. I received and audio review copy via Libro.FM, all opinions are my own.

[Brend · Rating 3 out of 5]

I never thought I would say this: the action was the best part of this story

[Demetri Papadimitropoulos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some Inheritances Are Better Tailored Than Preserved
In “In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts,” Gwendolyn Kiste refits “The Great Gatsby” into a queer Gothic of hungry houses, aging women, filial obligation, and the dangerous fantasy that love should keep someone unchanged.
By Demetris Papadimitropoulos | September 4th, 2026


“The Suit That Had to Fit the Living” – Vera’s needle refits Gatsby’s pink suit for Mel, turning inheritance from a form to inhabit into material that can be changed for the living.

Dressed in a pink suit that has outlived its owner by three decades, Mel Buchanan discovers how seductive a bad fit can be. The suit belonged to Jay Gatsby, which is trouble enough. In Gwendolyn Kiste’s “In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts,” objects cling to their former meanings almost as stubbornly as people do, and Gatsby’s suit carries the old promise of self-invention: perhaps a person can step into another shape and call it freedom. Mel nearly believes this. Vera, the woman she loves, answers with a needle. She takes the suit in at the seams. Beside the supernatural excess gathering on Long Island, the gesture looks almost comically modest. It is also the novella’s quiet counterspell. What is inherited need not be worshiped or destroyed. Sometimes it needs tailoring.

Everything begins with a death that should have been final. It is 1955, thirty-three years after Gatsby’s murder, and Pamela “Mel” Buchanan, daughter of Daisy and Tom, learns that Daisy has died inside Gatsby’s abandoned West Egg mansion. Mel has already survived the Depression, the collapse of Buchanan wealth, Tom’s violence and eventual suicide, Daisy’s long alcoholic decline, and a miserable marriage of her own. She now works at a Manhattan dry cleaner, where torn things arrive under bright lights and leave changed enough to be useful again. Gatsby’s house offers a grander repair service. It promises restoration: not a workable present, but the past returned intact.


“The House That Learned to Feed” – Gatsby’s mansion becomes appetite made architectural, its repeated windows and misregistered grandeur reducing Mel to a small figure before inherited hunger.

Memory in this house has a metabolism. The walls secrete ectoplasm; at three each morning they rebuild Gatsby’s old revelers from whatever scraps of recollection remain. Some guests emerge nearly persuasive. Others arrive with missing parts, bad seams, mouths that never formed. Jay Gatsby himself persists with unusual clarity, still bleeding from the wound that killed him and still hoping with such exertion that hope begins to resemble unpaid labor. Daisy appears too, at first as the twenty-three-year-old Gatsby remembers. When Mel reaches for her, she cracks apart. The mansion manufactures memory, and quality control has been dead for years.

Elapsed time is Kiste’s first real intervention. Rather than replay Gatsby’s famous summer from another chair at the table, she lets it harden into family history. Nghi Vo’s “The Chosen and the Beautiful” brilliantly reenters that summer through Jordan Baker; Kiste gives everyone but Gatsby three decades in which to age, work, fail, move, harden, soften, and discover what happens when the party becomes anecdote. She can write consequences rather than corrections. Gatsby’s wish to repeat the past is no longer a romantic impossibility suspended inside one tragic season. It has had thirty-three years to become infrastructure, complete with upkeep charged to people who never consented to inherit it.

The mansion feeds on living visitors, and their energy gives its recollections weight, appetite, even hands. Younger versions of guests begin consuming their older selves. Bodies return with seams visible and pieces missing. Kiste keeps dragging abstraction into matter until the old Gatsby vocabulary turns physical: nostalgia leaks; idealization develops a body count; longing leaves stains on the wallpaper. Fitzgerald’s yearning has become a production system, and the defective merchandise still bites.


“At Three, the Dead Begin Dancing” – Gatsby’s party returns at three in the morning, glamour and predation occupying the same floor as the dead borrow substance from the living.

Return trips between Manhattan and West Egg give that system its rhythm. Mel enters the mansion, learns something, loses something, retreats, then goes back. Each circuit alters the terms. Gatsby repeats because he cannot change. Mel repeats until she can. Manhattan contains rent, work, Vera, blistered fingers, sewing machines and an unwritten life. West Egg contains inherited property, family mythology, staged glamour and the fantasy that nothing need ever finish. The geography gives Mel’s divided loyalties a commuter schedule.

Inside the house, knowledge has an address. One locked room yields another; Gatsby’s bedroom hides a false wall; behind it waits a stairway; above that, an attic. The farther Mel moves through the architecture, the farther she gets beneath Gatsby’s preferred version. Family truth has literally been stored upstairs, behind more attractive rooms. Lili, the glamorous assistant to the washed-up spiritualist Harrison Shipton, turns out to be his daughter, another woman drafted into a parent’s unfinished ambition. Daisy’s youthful apparitions are not Daisy. Even the deed changes the moral geometry: Gatsby left the mansion to Daisy, so Mel has inherited legal title to somebody else’s fixation.

Past the false wall, Gatsby’s private romance begins to look less like longing than inventory. He has filled a room with Daisies. Some are almost right; others leak, slump, or emerge badly assembled. When a copy deteriorates beyond his tolerance, he does not repair her. He replaces her. Mel later watches him slit the throat of one failing version, let the body collapse into a husk, and bury it beneath a silk flower among the graves of earlier attempts. Romantic idealization becomes serial disposal. Kiste takes Gatsby’s dream at its word and finds an assembly line: the beloved is safest when she remains reproducible.


“Every Daisy Except Daisy” – Gatsby’s manufactured Daisies become an elegant inventory of idealization’s waste, each beautiful copy failing in a different seam.

At that point Gatsby could have collapsed into a straw villain in an excellent suit. He does not. He knows the copies fail. He is lonely inside the machinery he sustains and sometimes weary enough to wish he could disappear. His tenderness toward Mel is warped but recognizable, partly because she resembles Daisy and partly because the two of them occupy the same family disaster from opposite ends. The climax does not ask Mel to destroy Gatsby. It asks her to make him look.

Pamela has been practicing another kind of preservation all her life. As a child, after one rare afternoon when Daisy seemed happy, she silently promised that she would make her mother smile that way again. The promise becomes a private contract she never remembers signing: escorting Daisy home from bars, visiting after moving out, absorbing secrets she did not create, and finally treating death itself as one last chance to become the daughter who fixes everything. Childhood bargains have an embarrassing durability. They can govern an adult life long after the adults who inspired them have forgotten the terms. The haunting merely gives physical form to a question families manage every day without ectoplasm: when does care stop being love and become permission to disappear inside someone else’s need?

At the dry cleaner, Kiste gives Mel a world built on less glamorous rules. She takes wicked pleasure in becoming precisely the sort of daughter Tom Buchanan would have despised: blue-collar, divorced, in love with a woman, competent with a ledger and better with a seam. The Buchanans once possessed enormous houses and scant practical skill. Mel can mend a garment and earn a wage. Gatsby keeps by freezing. A tailor keeps by cutting, adjusting, patching and conceding that wear has already happened. Vera’s needle does not return the pink suit to 1922. It makes the old cloth answer to the body standing there now.

Daisy’s real ghost, when Mel finally reaches her, makes that difference brutal. She is not twenty-three. She is nearly sixty, gray-haired and carrying the face of the woman who actually survived those missing decades. Gatsby looks at her and refuses the evidence. She cannot be Daisy because she no longer resembles the image he maintained. Gatsby can resurrect Daisy indefinitely; what he cannot do is allow her a lifespan. His dream preserves the beloved by abolishing every version of her he did not personally witness. There is something colder than nostalgia in that refusal. It is love with no provision for another person’s time.

Images this good do not need much help, which makes Kiste’s most persistent weakness easier to name. Again and again, a scene completes the thought and Mel supplies the gloss. By the climax the house has demonstrated the cost of repetition, the copies have exposed the violence of idealization, and Daisy’s demands have shown how filial devotion can curdle into self-erasure. Yet the narration still pauses to tell us that Daisy does not want the kind of rescue Mel offers, that the past cannot be repeated or erased, that Gatsby and Daisy must be released. The conclusions are right. They are also plainer than the hauntings that produced them. There is a small irony in a book so suspicious of fixing people into one preferred form occasionally fixing its own meanings before the reader has finished trying them on.

More pressure falls on the secondary characters because of the novella’s brevity. Vera is warm, skilled, stubborn and brave, but she is also made to carry much of the book’s idea of a life ahead; Jordan, charismatic and evasive, bears much of the pull from behind. Lili’s refusal to continue Harrison’s ghostly ambition is moving, though so neatly parallel to Mel’s emancipation that one wishes their resemblance had acquired a few splinters. At 176 pages there is almost no dead air. There is also little room for these women to surprise the argument that recruited them. The neatness is not fatal, but it shows.

In Mel’s mouth, however, the book rarely sounds embalmed. Kiste makes no attempt at Fitzgeraldian ventriloquism. Her sentences are usually short to medium, quick on their feet and fond of bodily simile; Mel can register grief and ridiculousness before either has time to put on evening clothes. The body horror is splendidly indecorous: Jazz Age sheen keeps splitting open to reveal blood, ectoplasm and anatomy with assembly errors. Most effective is the textile vocabulary running beneath the gore. The house puts people together badly. Vera sews well. Kiste rarely needs a more elaborate theory of adaptation than that.


“A Different Theory of Keeping Things” – At the dry cleaner, Mel and Vera preserve by altering: worn cloth, old machines and shared labor make a future from what can still be repaired.

The 1955 setting denies Mel an easy escape into modern self-knowledge. When she and Vera finally kiss at the Bag, a lesbian bar, a vice-squad raid sends them running into the night. Their intimacy is not a wholesome present supplied to correct a decadent past; it is precarious, surveilled and dangerous in its own time. A freer emotional choice does not produce a freer society. That pressure keeps Vera from becoming merely the reward waiting outside the haunted house. A life with her remains a risk, just a risk that belongs to Mel rather than to her parents.

Revision has its best defense hanging in the dry cleaner. A canonical work can be embalmed in references or cut to a new shape; “In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts” earns its place when it does the latter. The point is not simply to add queer lives to Gatsby’s world or move a neglected woman toward the center. It is to examine what his celebrated longing looks like when the daughter who inherited its wreckage receives the bill. The novella’s smartest changes do not correct Fitzgerald sentence by sentence. They expose costs his ending had no reason to itemize.

Once the book becomes certain of its lesson, some of its strangeness stiffens. I can understand wanting more ambiguity from the final movement, though its emotional decisiveness mostly works on me. The richest passages live in rooms of copies, hungry walls, badly sewn bodies and an old pink suit waiting for another wearer. Those objects can hold several meanings at once. The explanatory passages sometimes ask them to hold still.

Part of what Mel must finally abandon is the flattering idea that rescue always means staying. Daisy’s demand for love has no natural stopping point: to satisfy her mother completely, Mel would have to remain in the mansion, die there and become another ghost. Letting Daisy go is not indifference. It is the first refusal in Mel’s life that does not require her to stop loving the person she refuses. When she persuades Gatsby to recognize the elderly Daisy before him, the house begins releasing its copies. They do not receive the grand reunion Gatsby spent decades manufacturing. They receive a quieter mercy: an ending.


“The Woman the Dream Could Not Recognize” – The real Daisy stands before Gatsby with decades written into her face, while the younger image he can accept remains the less substantial ghost.

Outside the house, endings become choices, some more convincing than others. Nick Carraway, who has spent decades wishing he had intervened before Gatsby’s death, finally intervenes and dies taking a bullet meant for Mel. Harrison proves the existence of ghosts by becoming one. Lili refuses to make his obsession her inheritance. Jordan leaves for California and invites Mel to follow; Mel declines, recognizing that chasing Jordan would only convert an old longing into a new itinerary. The resolutions line up almost suspiciously well, but their direction feels earned. Freedom here is less glamorous than fantasy, less photogenic than a green light, and much more useful.

Uneven only at its edges, “In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts” earns 85/100, or 4/5 Goodreads stars. Its best trick is to give Gatsby’s old longing bodies, rooms, seams and appetites. Its recurring misstep is almost the reverse: having built machinery this expressive, Kiste occasionally explains what it has already made impossible to miss.

Long after the mansion comes down, the pale green light remains across the water. Mel sells the property on the condition that Gatsby’s house be demolished and plans to spend part of the proceeds on new sewing machines. Monument becomes equipment; inheritance becomes work. It is a modest destination for a story built from legendary excess, and that modesty feels right. The old symbol does not need to be smashed. It only needs to lose jurisdiction. From the dock, the past is still bright enough to recognize and far enough away to refuse. Behind Mel waits Vera, a dry cleaner, a row of machines and the less glamorous work of making a life fit the person who has to live it.


“The Light That Lost Its Jurisdiction” – After the mansion falls, Mel faces the surviving green light across the water; Nick fades, Vera remains, and the old symbol is reduced from destination to distance.


Full-Body All-Character Watercolor Study


Important-Items Watercolor Study


Alternate Full-Jacket Study


Cover-Palette Proportion Study


Watercolor Material Grammar Study


Series Typography + “demetri” Signature Study


Border Architecture Study


Emblematic Composition Thumbnail Study


First Underdrawing


First-Wash Study


West Egg Mansion Spatial-Logic Study


Series Rhythm / Redundancy Contact Sheet

All watercolor illustrations by Demetris Papadimitropoulos.
Watercolors are done on 140lb vellum and then scanned into the computer using an Epson scanner. From there, they are finalized in Procreate. No AI was used in writing this review — all art and opinions are my own.

[sophie · Rating 2 out of 5]

thank you to edelweiss for the arc! please don't let my haterism dissuade you from reading this;
maybe you'll love it, but I sure didn't. Typically I try to dnf arcs if I know I won't like them, but this was so squarely in my niche (gay gatsby genre fiction) that i couldn't resist finishing it. I went in with a generous heart, but I couldn't ignore the boring character work and the juiceless horror (ironic). I regret to inform you that even being gay as fuck could not save this book. Yes, I'm sad about it too.

Conceptually, this is solid — Daisy's daughter investigating Gatsby's haunted house IS cool — but if you're doing Gatsby fanfic you simply Have to bring something to the table not already explored by the original text. and this really doesn't. everyone reading this novella will probably have read the original, or at least have cultural knowledge of the character's archetypes, which makes every agonizingly repetitive sentence about Tom/Daisy/Gatsby/Nick spelling out their feelings and motives VERY boring. The only character with original flavor is Jordan, and I'm giving her a whole extra star for being the milfy bisexual ladykiller of my dreams. Hello and god bless. She was complicated and interesting and not wholly transparent, unlike literally every other character.

My biggest gripe: retellings don't ever require the author to prove to the reader that they know the original back to front. It's always tedious and it's bad storytelling.





and also you cannot use "aw shucks" as an adjective, and you certainly can't do it TWICE

[The Blog Without a Face · Rating 2.25 out of 5]

Nobody in horror does goo like Gwendolyn Kiste. The walls of Gatsby's old place sweat ectoplasm that smells like champagne and bile, the orange juice machine in the dining room starts pumping blood, and the dead partygoers climb out of the plaster with their seams showing because the house can't remember where all the goddamn pieces go. I ate that up. The premise is that Daisy Buchanan's daughter (yes, the kid Fitzgerald mentions once and then forgets exists) gets a call in 1955 that her mother's been found dead in the abandoned mansion in West Egg, and she and a fifty-five-year-old, chain-smoking, bisexual Jordan Baker start driving out there at three every morning with a washed-up séance act to find out why. That's a pitch. I would buy that pitch off a guy in a parking lot.

Then every chapter turns out to be the same chapter. Drive to Long Island, clock strikes three, slime, clock strikes four, drive home, work a shift at the dry cleaner, repeat. Mel explains the rules of the house about nine separate times, in case you were in the bathroom, and narrates her feelings in lines like "I'm scorched earth, poison incarnate," and ma'am, you hem slacks for a living. Every Fitzgerald line you remember from tenth grade gets wheeled out and hit like a gong (old sport, careless people, the green light, all of it), and the revelation the back half hinges on is a plot point from the original novel that anybody who did the reading already knows. Kiste pulled this exact move in Reluctant Immortals, dragging Dracula's Lucy and the wife from Rochester's attic out to 1967 Los Angeles, and it ruled, because those women had somewhere to go. Mel Buchanan mostly has Long Island. I'll still buy whatever Kiste writes next the day it drops. I'd just like her to bring her own dead people this time.

- Review by Mr. November

[Olivia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh I loved this one. It’s such a fitting time for Gatsby to enter the public domain and explore how little we’ve changed from rubbernecking the excess of glitz, celebrity, and tragedy. Gwendolyn Kiste really knows how to write a convincing ghost story, equal parts spectral and rotten. New characters slotted into the world convincingly and fully believable arcs from the returning cast of The Great Gatsby.

Thanks to Creature Publishing and Netgalley for eARC. Video review to come.

[Mar Que · Rating 2.5 out of 5]

Вот знаете, многие любят в рецензиях на ретеллинги и адаптации жаловаться, что автор не уважает первоисточник. У Гвендолин Кайст ситуация ровно противоположная. Она ​​пытается доказать читателю, что прочла «Великого Гэтсби» и относится к нему с таким уважением, что её собственная повесть, по сути, не предлагает ничего, чего не было бы в оригинале.

В «In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts» снова поднимается тема ностальгии, неспособности отпустить прошлое и стагнации из-за этого. И в контексте истории про дом с привидениями и тяжёлые послевоенные годы это работает. Тут даже некоторые фразы и образы скопированы из оригинала (зелёный свет, розовый костюм, все вокруг Гэтсби ничтожества и т.д.), но это не вызывает того же отклика, потому что в качестве главной героини этой истории Кайст зачем-то выбрала Памэлу - дочь Дейзи и Тома Бьюкененов, которой в «Великом Гэтсби» было года 3, и упоминалась она и вовсе всего 2 раза.

Автор пытается изображать Мэл в состоянии тоски не столько по родителям, сколько по жизни, которая могла бы у неё быть, если бы Дейзи выбрала Гэтсби. Тогда её детство было бы счастливее, а её мать бы не спилась. Но потом Кайст переводит внимание на безответную многолетнюю влюблённость Мэл в женщину, фактически мать ей заменившую, - Джордан Бэйкер, и это тоже никуда не двигается.

Всю новеллу Мэл пытается освободить душу своей матери, потому что она «хорошая дочь», но в итоге Дейзи мы видим только в самом конце. Ник Каррауэй, главный герой и фокальный персонаж оригинала (которого Мэл постоянно цитирует) тоже появляется только в конце. И там же умирает.

Просто какой смысл читать эту повесть, если можно просто прочесть первоисточник?

Телеграм-канал «Яблоневый Сад Эвридики»

[Lorin (paperbackbish) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you Creature Publishing for my free ARC of In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts by Gwendolyn Kiste — out now!

» READ IF YOU «
🥂 love Gatsby vibes, but feminist
👻 want to throw a roaring 20s party with ghosts
💔 crave a reckoning with obsession, control, and being erased

» SYNOPSIS «
In 1955, Daisy's daughter Mel is informed of her untimely death, but she's really been gone for years. Now Gatsby's old mansion is haunted, Daisy's ghost is frozen in time, and a very undead Gatsby is still throwing parties nobody asked for. Mel's the only one who can put a stop to it, if the mansion doesn't devour her first.

» REVIEW «
Give me a feminist lens on any classic work of literature and I am there, immediately. Kiste takes this story soooo often read as a tragic romance and reframes it as exactly what it always was—a portrait of obsession and the removal of a woman's autonomy by the men who claim to love her. Centering Mel, Daisy's overlooked daughter, is such a great choice; she gives us an outsider's POV into just how much damage Gatsby's version of "love" actually did.

The mansion itself is such a perfect vessel for this tragic kind of haunting. It's feeding purely on unfulfilled longing, growing more monstrous the longer it's fed. And Kiste's prose has the same kind of tarnished opulence to it that made the original so seductive in the first place, except now you can really see the ugliness underneath all that gilding. To be real, any author brave enough to haunt a work of classic literature gets a hell yes from me. This is a lovely, ghostly reckoning with a story we all think we already know.

» RATING «
🥂 I'm Gilded 🥂

» READ-A-LIKES «
• Reluctant Immortals by Gwendolyn Kiste
• The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
• Lady Macbeth by Ava Reid
• The Great Gatsby (2013 film)

[ฅ^•⩊•^ฅ · Rating 0.25 out of 5]

The only reason I didn’t DNF this book is because it was short but those 176 pages felt like 600. I like horror, I like queer stories, but I’m tired of trauma being the only thing that seems to matter in literature right now. It’s exhausting. I went in hoping for a haunting story that would genuinely chill me to the bone and give me goosebumps, but instead it just made me roll my eyes. I’ve honestly felt more scared reading Goosebumps books than this.

The worst part? Aside from the heavy focus on trauma, definitely the mommy issues. If I had a mother like Daisy, I wouldn’t care about her at all. There’s no way I’d go chasing her or her ghost into a haunted house. I’d be running the other way. Another thing that really bothered me was Mel and us focusing more on her love life that the actual story. The haunted house? Not haunted. Not scary. Just kind of… there. The ghosts were fine, I guess. Daisy’s were the only ones that stood out even a little.

At least now I know that “feminist horror” apparently means “no horror, just vibes and trauma.”. But hey, at least it was short.

[Reactor Magazine]

"When I have encountered the word legasequel in the wild, it often comes attached to a film that continues a popular series years after the last installment appeared, generally focusing on a new generation of characters. Star Wars: The Force Awakens and Creed are the two most prominent cinematic examples, though they’re far from alone. One doesn’t hear the phrase used as much in literature, in part because generational changes are often built into long-running series.

Gwendolyn Kiste’s novel In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts is an interesting case, partly because it’s a sequel to a book that Kiste did not write. Specifically, it’s a follow-up to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, which Kiste writes “shaped my life in innumerable ways” since she first read it. Where Kiste breaks from Fitzgerald is through her use of the supernatural: If the characters in the original novel reckoned with metaphorical ghosts, in Kiste’s follow-up, the ghosts are both real and frequently hungry."

Tobias Carroll reviews Gwendolyn Kiste's latest horror.

[Michela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ohhh I really enjoyed In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts by Gwendolyn Kiste!
It was the perfect read for this time of the year, with its glamour, melancholy and spookiness. In my head this is the official sequel of The Great Gatsby and nobody can't make me change my mind. Kiste knows how to write a gloomy atmosphere, and I really liked going back into that world even though it was temporary and... well, ghostly.
Listened to the audiobook in one sitting, the narrator Stephanie Németh-Parker did a great job!

* I'd like to thank Gwendolyn Kiste, Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for providing this ALC in exchange for my honest review.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you NetGalley and Dreamscape Media for the ALC of In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts!

I always thought the Great Gatsby was a bit of a horror novel, so getting a continuation of the story that includes body horror and ghosts (and sapphic yearning!!!) was absolutely wonderful! You get the feeling of being right back in West Egg at a Gatsby party and you get to re-interact with all the old favorite characters. It was wonderful and spooky and deeply unsettling.

[Niniane · Rating 3 out of 5]

I clearly hoped more on the side of atmosphere and development.

Like, it wasn't bad. The style was bland, sure, but some ideas were good, such as making Gatsby obsessed with the ghost of an idealized woman. The theme of closure and breaking cycles is always one I appreciate.

But I felt like you clearly needed to appreciate the original to enjoy it. And why I am familiar with the characters and the plot of the original novel, I probably missed many things.

Daisy haunts the narrative, both literally and metaphorically. I clearly hoped for a deconstruction of her character, more complexity. An opportunity for her to tell her own side of the story. Sadly, it never came.

[Maé · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishing for providing me this arc.

Let me preface by saying I’m not too knowledgable on The Great Gatsby. I know the story, but I can’t say I ever took an interest in its themes or its meaning. So this is a review coming from someone with fairly fresh eyes on this story. But the gorgeous cover and the summary completed attracted me to this arc. This story is about Mel, Daisy Buchanan’s daughter, who discovers her mother passed away in Gatsby’s house. She will investigate the house itself, where she will meet its ghosts, and allow to discover more of the dark past from her mother’s youth.

“You’re not the same as your family, Mel.”
But what if I am? I want to ask her. It’s the question that haunts me, the one thing no one can truly answer. How much do we owe the world for the sins of our parents? How do we make amends for the mistakes we never made?

The plot itself was very well handled. I liked how easy it was get to pulled into the story, as Mel goes to visit the mysterious house night after night. The pace is quite fast, as it’s focused on the few hours Mel spends there, so it turns the book in quite a page-turner. For lesser fans of the original story like myself, we rediscover the story through Mel’s eyes, and it was actually quite interesting to see it with another POV. Still, I don’t think people who love the original book would get bored, as it’s more focused on the impact all the events had on Daisy and Mel’s themselves.

I was originally really interested in the ghosts aspect, but it’s never truly explained. It’s just dropped on us, both the reader and Mel, and we take it as it comes. It didn’t feel like a fantastical read as the ghosts were just a means to an end, rather than an actual plotline of the book. Still, it was easy to envision this atmospherical and horrific revival of Gatsby’s parties.

There it is, the one fact I’ve known all my life: I’m no more than an extension of my mother, her vestigial limb of a daughter. This is how it’s always been. I’m remembered if she’s remembered. And I’m forgotten if she’s forgotten.

The strength of this book is truly the exploration of Mel’s character, who depends a lot on the relationship she had with her mother (or lack of). She spent her entire life in the shadows of her mother’s ghosts, and the trauma she can’t let go of. Still, Mel managed to persevere and build her own life. This book will allow her to both grieve her mother, and let go of the past she wasn’t even a part of, and it was really well done in the matter of character development.

There’s also a romance in this book, between Mel and her friend. I don’t think it was truly necessary to the story, but it gave a nice little reprieve in Mel’s trauma and the ghosts haunting her. It helped showing how she finally manages to move on. There’s a little bit of a love triangle, because of Mel’s crush on Jordan, but it was just another way to highlight how Mel was attracted to her mother’s past.

What is the weight of the past? And how much of it should each of us be expected to carry? After all, these were never my secrets to bear. And I won’t hold on to them any longer.

I really enjoyed entering Gatsby’s world in this new way, and it was a genuinely interesting point of view into this well loved story. Mel is a really good character, and her development truly makes the beauty of this book.

[C. Sinclair · Rating 3 out of 5]

We've all got to reckon with the past one way or another.

3.4/5

I wasn't entirely sure what I was expecting from In These Gilded Ghostly Hearts, but I was immediately intrigued by the premise. Gwendolyn Kiste's writing is not, ultimately, a style that particularly grips me as a reader, although that's very much a matter of personal preference. This novella's great limitation may simply be that it is a novella: there is enough substance here that more time with the characters and their ideas would have enriched rather than diluted the story. What I did appreciate was the clear familiarity with Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby underpinning the story. The overall premise is thoughtfully constructed and it is highly evident that Kiste has not simply borrowed the framework of a classic, but has read it critically and repeatedly enough to engage meaningfully with its architecture and subtext, making its re-engineering feel authentic.

The sections that most deeply invested me were the depictions of Mel navigating a time and place of LGBTQ intolerance. Kiste writes these moments with affecting reverence and rich historical callbacks that make every facet feel deeply considered. The intimacies, distances, hopes and heartaches echoed off the pages with resonating force. I found myself particularly wishing Mel's personal experiences and observations had occupied more of the book. There is something genuinely moving in the way these moments are rendered, and I think the story could have benefited enormously from giving them more room to develop. Especially considering that I was unsurprised by many of the plot developments. To be fair, that speaks to the story's organic construction — the pieces generally fall where they ought to — but in such a concise book, predictability began to flatten the impact of that progression. The plot persisted where I wished it had thickened. I think I would have been more invested had there been less reliance on visceral symbolic imagery and more room for nuance, notably in the places where the characters and their identities are at their most compelling.

Ultimately, In These Gilded Ghostly Hearts is a successful novella, and I certainly didn't dislike it. I simply wanted more from it — more Mel, more surprise, more nuance, and perhaps more space for an already interesting premise to become something richer. A hunger which, in its own way, might entitle me to a pink suit of my own.


Thank you to NetGalley and Creature Publishing for the advanced reader copy of this novella in exchange for an honest review. It is always a pleasure and privilege to be trusted with pre-publication work and I look forward to the next.

[Catriona Mowat · Rating 4 out of 5]

In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts is a sumptuously decadent haunted house story.
Set 30 years after the events of the Great Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan is found dead in the abandoned and crumbling mansion once owned by Gatsby himself. Now it is up to Pamela, Daisy’s daughter, to finally lay her mother to rest. If the secrets of the past will let her go, that is…

Kiste writes a sensitive and haunting sequel which will satisfy readers very familiar with The Great Gatsby, as well as readers who are new to his decadent world. With Easter eggs to book and film, this story has love and reverence for the source material poured into every word, and it showed.
The sapphic subplot adds an extra dimension to the plot that I absolutely loved: featuring forbidden love and police raids, the historical details added a horrific and threatening undertone to an otherwise beautiful love story. The haunted house elements are gothic and full of atmosphere and faded grandeur, the house a character in its own right. The ghosts themselves are ethereal and delicate, drowning in the vast nothingness that surrounds them. This is gothic prose done well.
It may be short, but this book packs a punch, and I found myself flying through it. If anything, I wanted more of everything! The story was over before I knew it, any loose ends satisfied. Like the house, I was hungry for more of these characters.

A unique concept, In The Gilded, Ghostly Hearts is a true testament to the gilded age. Full of sparkling champagne, music, and twenties flair, you won’t be sorry to step back into the world of Jay Gatsby, in the way that only Gwendolyn Kiste could deliver so perfectly.

[RavenReads · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really eager to read this one because The Great Gatsby is one of my favorite books, and the idea of returning to that world with a ghostly twist sounded like it was written specifically for me. Unfortunately, I came away a little disappointed.

There were a few historical inaccuracies that pulled me out of the story, but my bigger issue was that there simply wasn’t enough of what I was promised. I wanted more. More Daisy. More Gatsby. More of that glittering, decadent world. And, most importantly, more of the haunting.

Perhaps some of this is simply a consequence of the book’s length, because the premise had so much potential. I wanted to feel that same strange, intoxicating magic that makes Gatsby so compelling. The wealth, the longing, the ghosts of the past, but I never quite found it here. It felt like I was standing just outside the party, looking through the window at a world I desperately wanted to enter.

That said, I really enjoyed the audiobook. The narrator did a fantastic job, and the overall production quality was excellent. A gorgeous premise with so much potential, but ultimately I was left wishing there had been more time to really inhabit this gilded, ghostly world.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Gwendolyn Kiste, and Dreamscape Media for the ALC. All opinions are my own.

[Matt M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed IN THESE GILDED, GHOSTLY HEARTS, a new sequel/reimagining of THE GREAT GATSBY. Full disclosure, I actually haven’t read the novel THE GREAT GATSBY, but was of course very aware of the story and have seen at least one iteration of it over the years.

But when Gwendolyn Kiste asked if I wanted to check it out, I said YES! I was a huge fan of Kiste’s Bram Stoker winning novel THE HAUNTING OF VELKWOOD. I’m happy to report I really enjoyed IN THESE GILDED, GHOSTLY HEARTS, too!

This novella follows Daisy Buchanan’s daughter after the former dies and she is called to Gatsby’s old home, which as it turns out… is haunted. And the way in which it is haunted is so cool.

Kiste’s prose is beautiful but never overwritten. The atmosphere is impeccable (this is perfect for spooky season) and the characters well drawn for such a short book. You don’t need to have read the original novel (like me) to enjoy this book. I imagine that having read it will enhance your enjoyment even more (if you’ve read both I’d love to hear your thoughts!).

In short, if you’re looking for a short haunted house read to put in your spooky season TBR, IN THESE GILDED, GHOSTLY HEARTS is an excellent addition. It is creepy, atmospheric, beautiful, and queer. If you’ve enjoyed Kiste’s work before, this is a must-read.

Thank you to the author for an ARC and to the publisher and LibroFM for an ALC!

[Sandra Vd Donk · Rating 4 out of 5]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

In These Gilded, Ghostly Hearts by Gwendolyn Kiste.
Published by @creaturepublishing

OUT NOW!!!

This is a short novella under 200 pages.
Based on The Great Gatsby comes this Dark and queer story.
Daisy and Mel are mother and daughter.
Their story is complex, difficult and emotional.
Mel has to uncover secrets from the past to put her mother to rest.
Will she succeed or will the ghost of her mother will haunt the mansion forever??

Thank you @netgalley and @creaturepublishing
for this short but amazing read.

#netgalley #books #booksta #booktok
#bookshelf

[Liz · Rating 3 out of 5]

A gothic, atmospheric, queer retelling of The Great Gatsby.

This was a solid, well-researched spin on a classic told in novella format. The story revolves around Daisy’s daughter and her search for closure after her mother’s death while finding her footing in an intolerant world.

This was a solid 3 stars for me. I enjoyed the writing style but found it difficult to connect with the characters initially (a common problem with novellas). By the time I became sufficiently invested, it was nearly over. Ultimately, I felt that this one needed a little more room to stretch its legs.

The audiobook narration was very well done. Strong voice, tone, and cadence that felt authentic to the characters and time period.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ALC in exchange for my honest review.

[Tye Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

A creative, queer, paranormal take on Gatsby that I can really appreciate. I enjoyed this one generally, but it felt like there was something missing, perhaps due to the short length of the story. It's entertaining for what it is, though.

Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for this arc!

[Victoria Sampley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The beginning is jarring with how it plunges us in the story. I enjoyed the scenes with the mansion and ghosts. I could’ve used more atmosphere though. Definitely more about our main character dealing with her own issues and growing from that. I do think this could’ve benefited by being longer.

[Beas Chattaraj · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bittersweet tale of love and longing, a spectral reimagining of Jay Gatsby’s hope. This short novella is a journey of letting go. It did become repetitive after a while, but I stayed for my love of the original tale. It was a soothing and an enjoyable listen. Thank you LibroFm for the ALC!