Make Me Better, the latest novel from genre star Sarah Gailey, emerges in a place you think you can predict. It begins with some classic genre trappings, it introduces a creepy location, and falls into certain rhythms that seasoned fans of the genre, particularly fans of horror surrounding cults, will pick up on right away. But those familiar rhythms soon give way to something else: An emotional tapestry of dread that’ll soak into every pore, as scary for its interiority as it is for its folk and cult horror trappings.
Celia, a lonely woman whose fertility issues and miscarriages have left her wracked with grief, is hopeful about her visit to Kindred Cove. She hopes the island, famous for its healing salt on grocery store shelves and its annual “Salt Festival” retreat for a few lucky visitors, will grant her the healing she needs. Maybe she’ll even run into an old friend who told her about the Festival in the first place.
But when she arrives at Kindred Cove, surrounded by the salty Lake Vetiver and its vibrant, biologically fascinating reef, Celia finds something a bit more unconventional than she expected. Her phone is confiscated, residents and visitors alike seem to vanish from activities without explanation, and her assigned companion for the week, Cove native Easy, isn’t helping matters with her cryptic reasoning for everything. But Celia wants to be better, wants it more than anything, and soon she dives headlong into what Kindred Cove has to offer her, particularly the community’s promise that “nothing is ever lost.”
If you’re familiar with even a few of the narratives in the cult horror subgenre, stuff like Midsommar or even The Wicker Man, you immediately feel at home in the world Gailey’s building here, but that’s just what gets you in the door. As Celia journeys deeper into Kindred Cove’s secrets, the book also journeys back in time, charting the course of the people who run the island now, how they got here, what they’ve done, and how it all becomes part of Celia’s own journey. The book becomes an epic, growing far beyond Celia, to the point that it almost feels overstuffed with material. But the epic qualities grow beyond the plot, and that’s the real trick to Make Me Better‘s success.
There are few genre authors working today who can craft sentences like Gailey. Their work is lyrical, precise, and often stealthily profound. They build layers of dread in their characters and in their worlds, and center it all on the interiority of those characters, until by the end it’s as much about someone’s mental state as it is about the state of the world around them. In Make Me Better, we come to know Celia intimately, and yet in the pressure cooker that is Kindred Cove, we feel like we get to know her all over again with each passing chapter, because Celia is determined, at all costs, to grow through her experience.
In one of the most honest and unflinching depictions of a cult I’ve ever read in fiction, Gailey offers in Celia the sense that we are being immersed in the culture of Kindred Cove, not just as observers but as participants. They ask us to be honest with ourselves about what we would take from such an experience, and never tip their hand as to what Celia might do next. It’s an emotional epic as much as it’s a narrative one, and Gailey never gives in to easy answers for their protagonist.
The result is a work of stunning verisimilitude, and since it’s a horror novel, that means we don’t just witness the dread, but embody it. If you’re looking for loads of jump scares and gore, you won’t find them here, but you will find a truly unsettling reading experience that’ll keep you up late into the night.
It’s rare to feel so immersed in such a patient, slow-burn of a novel, but with Make Me Better, Gailey crafts images and moments so vivid you’ll swear you can taste the salt on your tongue.
Make Me Better is now available wherever you get your books.
