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eBook Category: Horror
eBook Description: Young Nick Carraway's mysterious neighbor, Fitz, knows all the beautiful women and all the important people. Yet slowly, Nick begins to realize that Fitz is a vampire. How does he maintain his undead life? And why is Fitz so important?

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1995
Fictionwise Release Date: April 2004

34 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [84 KB], eReader (PDB) [35 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [22 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [20 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [71 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [93 KB], hiebook (KML) [76 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [53 KB], iSilo (PDB) [18 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [23 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [51 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [34 KB]
Words: 6788
Reading time: 19-27 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

"Kristine Kathryn Rusch's recent "The Beautiful and the Damned," narrated by the grandson of Gatsby narrator Nick Carraway. Although Rusch is no Fitzgerald, it's fun to watch her literalize the metaphorical vampirism that haunts so much of his fiction."--Publishers Weekly

Chapter I

I come from the Middle West, an unforgiving land with little or no tolerance for imagination. The wind blows harsh across the prairies, and the snows fall thick. Even with the conveniences of the modern age, life is dangerous there. To lose sight of reality, even for one short romantic moment, is to risk death.

I didn't belong in that country, and my grandfather knew it. I was his namesake, and somehow, being the second Nick Carraway in a family where the name had a certain mystique had forced that mystique upon me. He had lived in the East during the twenties, and had had grand adventures, most of which he would not talk about. When he returned to St. Paul in 1928, he met a woman--my grandmother Nell--and with her solid, common sense had shed himself of the romance and imagination that had led to his adventures in the first place.

Although not entirely. For when I announced, fifty years later, that I intended to pursue my education in the East, he paid four years of Ivy League tuition. And, when I told him, in the early '80s, that, despite my literary background and romantic nature, I planned a career in the securities business, he regaled me with stories of being a bond man in New York City in the years before the crash.

He died while I was still learning the art of the cold call, stuck on the sixteenth floor of a windowless high rise, in a tiny cubicle that matched a hundred other tiny cubicles, distinguished only by my handprint on the phone set and the snapshots of my family thumbtacked to the indoor-outdoor carpeting covering the small barrier that separated my cubicle from all the others. He never saw the house in Connecticut which, although it was not grand, was respectable, and he never saw my rise from a cubicle employee to a man with an office. He never saw the heady Reagan years, although he would have warned me about the awful Black Monday well before it appeared. For despite the computers, jets, and televised communications, the years of my youth were not all that different from the years of his.