Beautiful Creatures Before

The Middle of Nowhere

• You're at the beginning of 2,000 pages of reading (if you count the entire series, of course). So take a deep breath and get comfortable.
• To start us off, the narrator sets the scene of the novel: we're in Gatlin, South Carolina, the "middle of nowhere" in the chapter title, which is populated by two kinds of people: "the stupid and the stuck" (Before.1).
• It's the last day of summer and our narrator is about to go to sleep. He's thinking that nothing ever changes in Gatlin and, well, he thinks he knows everything.
• But a curse is about to change things. Dun dun dun.