Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey
What lengths would you go to in the pursuit of emotional healing and belonging? How do cults, or more broadly what the author refers to as high-control communities, operate? Sarah Gailey did a masterful job of exploring those ideas and more in this book.
I wanted to read another recent horror release in the leadup to October/Halloween, and after doing some research, I stumbled onto this novel. The horror in this book was decidedly different from The Widows of Winding Gale in that it operated at a real human level. There were some fantastical elements that came into play with the reef surrounding the island where the story took place, but those elements took a backseat to the horror generated by the characters.
I felt compassion for our main character, Celia:
She wondered what the kid wasn't getting in his diet, and immediately felt overwhelmed by the idea of trying to find a way to fix it (6).
She reached down and rolled up her yoga pants—the lightning motif ones from last December, which she hadn't been able to sell and ended up buying from herself to keep her numbers up—then slipped off her shoes (7).
Gailey dropped little details, leading me to dread what might be coming:
Her eyes fell on the zipper. She always put the tabs to one far side, so they tucked under the lip of the fabric on the corner of the bag and would be less likely to accidentally come undone. Now, the tabs were squarely centered, a finger-width gap between them (19).
The material was stained heavily with blood. Lots of the shoes donated by mainland researchers were like that. William said it was a natural consequence of confining oneself to deviant separation from contact with the earth (73).
I was quite disturbed by how realistically human the character interactions felt in this book, but not in a way that precluded my enjoyment of it. All those hints and details pulled me through the story, wanting to know how everything was going to work out. I'm excited to read more of Sarah Gailey's books and will keep an eye out for what they write next.
Gailey, Sarah. Make Me Better. Tor Books, 2026.