Review of Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey

I am sure I have said this before: every Sarah Gailey book is a slightly different experience. I never know quite what I’ll get. All of their books blend science fiction, horror, and contemporary fiction in such unique amounts. I actually would have a hard time pointing you to a favourite—Spread Me appears to be the winner, simply by dint of the five stars it received from me at the start of this year, yet that might have been shock. I think Sarah Gailey is one of those rare authors where I love their writing more than I love any one of their individual books, if that makes sense. Make Me Better is no exception. Gailey explores cult dynamics while also digging into this idea of belonging to something greater than oneself that was so central to Spread Me (though the two, as far as I can tell, are not related).

Celia is grieving, and she wants the pain to stop. She signs up for the Salt Festival, an annual excursion by invitation to a reclusive island, Kindred Cove, whose inhabitants live a simple life. Celia met someone from there, and she’s hoping to reconnect with her and find … something. Healing. Wholeness. Yet as the week of the Salt Festival continues, peppered with copious flashbacks to years and even decades prior for history on Kindred Cove’s founding, it’s quickly apparent there is a lot more simmering beneath the surface of this secluded sandbar on a lake whose waters and reefs defy analysis.

Right from the start, this book screams “cult shit.” If the blurb from the inimitable Courtney Summers, author of The Project, wasn’t sufficient, the very beginning where Celia and the gang have to give up all their phones and personal belongings upon arrival should ring some alarm bells. Then people start to vanish, but Celia just gets told they are “in another group” that day. And Celia keeps trying to duck her minder, only to stumble across weird stuff that, yeah, screams cult. This is Grade A thriller movie fuel.

The flashbacks further enhance this atmosphere. As Celia’s story continues in the present, Gailey takes us into the past of many of the island’s inhabitants. Some of their stories take place on the mainland, where we see who they were before they moved to Kindred Cove. Hovering in the background, presence always felt yet never actually seen on the page, is Dad. He’s the mysterious founder of this cult, and I love how we never meet him. It’s always just, “Dad did this,” “Dad said that,” and through these references Gailey establishes the absolute chokehold this man had over his followers. One question I was left with after reading was whether Dad knew about, even understood, the nature of the island/lake before he established the cult there, or if it was just a happy accident.

I won’t go into many details about the island, the lake, and the mysterious reef, for that would be telling. Suffice it to say, the science fictional parts of this story are extremely subtle—more so even than in Just Like Home up until the final quarter of the book, where they get ever-so-slightly more prominent. Like, if you are someone who reads thrillers about cults yet doesn’t want to read science fiction, you would still enjoy this book.

At first I was disappointed these speculative aspects were so subtle. It feels like you can excise them and the book would largely be the same. Yet my suspicion is Gailey wants to draw attention to the liminal space in which cults operate. Every cult is built on a myth, a Big Lie if you will, that relies in a belief on transcendence beyond our humanity. Some of those myths are built off existing religions. Some of these myths are spun, out of whole cloth, and then cloaked in pseudoreligious or spiritual trappings. In the case of Make Me Better, the speculative aspects of the story reify that transcendence in a way that emphasizes both the horror and the depth of the desperation Celia feels.

Which brings me, of course, to our protagonist. Privileged basic bitch Celia. Make Me Better is a masterclass in tone if only because Gailey comes sooooo close to making this novel a smirking satire of privileged white women, yet they firmly remain on the other side of the line. Yes, we are supposed to sympathize with Celia—because that is the point of this book’s exploration of cult shit. Unlike so many of the other characters we learn about through flashbacks, Celia is not particularly down on her luck. Cults go after privileged people, people with money, as evidenced by the Audrey subplot, because that is how they sustain themselves. Just because you are successful doesn’t make you immune. Is Celia more amenable to falling for cult shit because she’s a Stanley-cup-toting, yoga-attending, MLM groupie? (Some of those descriptors are accurate.) Sure. Is her idea about having a child to fix all her problems completely laughably incorrect to someone like me, a single aroace woman who is childfree by choice? Yes.

But fundamentally, Celia goes to Kindred Cove because she feels broken. She has played by the rules all her life, followed the dictates of patriarchy and capitalism, tried to be an entrepreneur and tried her best to find a man and make a baby and do everything else a good girl ought to do—and it has brought her nothing but misery and desolation. So of course she’s going to run off and join a cult. It makes perfect sense, and it makes Celia an excellent protagonist. She’s gullible enough to go to Kindred Cove and generally accept what Early and the others feed her—yet she is also driven and suspicious enough to poke around, question, tug at the fraying tapestry that is the Cove’s security and secrets.

There’s so much I could discuss about the Cove. How the room in the Old House made me think of the Box from that DS9 episode where Sisko and O’Brien crash on the agrarian throwback cult planet. How the abysmal treatment of Jesse made me want to defend her at all costs. How life within the cult has reshaped some people so completely they view casual murder as justified. But what I really want to focus on is how much the cult gets right. For example, children on Kindred Cove aren’t raised by their parents. The nuclear family has been dismantled, and children are a community concern. Now, I am not advocating that we get rid of families—nor is Gailey—but it’s a great example of how cult propaganda is often founded upon legitimate discontent with our society. Celia wants a family of her own, wants to belong somewhere, and that hasn’t happened for her. So she has come to a place that radically challenges her very idea of what it means to be a family, to belong. And outside of a cult, I think this is good. As a queer person who, again, won’t be starting a family of my own in any traditional sense, I think the idea that we should challenge Eurocentric views on childrearing and social units is fundamentally sound. The cult, however, takes it way too far.

And that’s the rub, as they say. Wouldn’t it be paradise if … except it’s not. The fraying edges of Kindred Cove creep into every chapter, from the near-constant reminders of the island’s precarious food situation to the unshocking revelations about William’s off-island proclivities and activities when he does a supply run or deals with nosy researchers. I’d say no cult is truly stable, but it might actually be more accurate to say no society is truly stable, and one of a cult’s biggest problems is it tries to craft a fully functioning society in microcosm from a bunch of randos it has cobbled together. The difficulty level to achieve stability skyrockets, so it isn’t that surprising when a cult implodes.

Yet for all that Gailey explores these tantalizing ideas about cult behaviour, the dissolution of familial ties in favour of communal and collective ones, the weird and messed up crime and punishment of this island, Make Me Better always comes back to Celia. This really is her story, all other appearances aside, and Gailey grounds that in the final chapters. Celia makes a choice. I won’t spoil it. I’ll come back to this review next year, having forgotten the ending, and curse myself—but I think it is … interesting. Not surprising, especially given how Spread Me ends—I think Gailey enjoys delivering us into discomfort.

Wow, will you look at that? I’ve talked myself into giving this book four stars. I was originally going to give it three, but I can’t really think of much I want to say in terms of serious critique. It’s missing a little something for me personally to give it a five-star read, but this is as solid a Gailey book as I have read so far, and I highly recommend.