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Beautiful Creatures Before Summary

How It All Goes Down

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.