I think I'm having the opposite problem with Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep that I was having with Make Me Better, which is that the plot is intriguing but the writing style is garbage
Think I'm gonna put this one down. Here's the angry list I typed up last night while trying to decide whether to delay sleep by turning the (loud) AC back on or suffering and maybe going to sleep eventually (I turned the AC back on--I have earplugs and also don't pay an electric bill. suffering is for protestants):
Adding to this is the fucking obnoxious-ass Interlude that's basically the author humble-bragging about how it's sooooo hard to write a novel but look he did it anyway yay him and also ooohhhh you silly dumb dumb reader, did you ever consider who the narrator in this story is??
Like 1. Fuck off. 2. Fuck off. 3. Go read Harrow the Ninth and be murdered by its glorious play on perspective. Remember when I was complaining about Dudebro Sci Fi a couple months ago? This is Dudebro Sci Fi. So self-important and obsessed with being Smarter Than Everyone that it kills its own story by having to mansplain everything from the plot of Weekend at Bernie's to basic video game strategy to the fucking plot twist.
I'm really disappointed bc it's such a good idea, and the You chapters are really interesting horror, but I'm not gonna sit around for another 200 pages and be blatantly patronized by an author with a diagnosable superiority complex to see if it pays off (actually, I skimmed the end, and I don't think it does pay off). Time to pick a different book.
Overall....not a bad book by any means (Gailey could not write a bad book if they tried) but definitely not my favourite of theirs (Just Like Home reigns supreme lol). It's an "I get what the author was going for but I don't think they totally succeeded" kind of feeling. Or else I just missed something big because I was too busy being a cult nerd to see the metaphor lol.
Overall, 3.5 stars, and if you like books about cults you should absolutely check it out, but I have Many Thoughts.
Rambling below the cut:
I would've turned the dial on this book from "lit-horror" to pure horror and ratcheted up the unease and tension
Celia is just kind of there, as a sort of boilerplate example of The Kind Of Person Who Joins A Cult. She's kind of unsatisfying to follow. IMO Adelaide should've been the main character, and the story should've focused more on her leaving, unlearning the things the cult taught her, becoming friends (lovers? maybe?) with Celia and trying to get Easy out
The visceral horror of the birth scene was excellent, we needed more of that.
There were too many flashbacks to random characters and scenes, which made the middle of the book drag and killed a lot of the tension before it could really build.
The coral! The coral. It's kind of an elephant in the room. You have a cult on an island, and then one day there's a catastrophe that kills the cult leader and man-eating coral fills the waters around the island. Yet the cult and the coral are not really tied together, except that the coral is a convenient body-eating graveyard for anyone they want to get rid of
IMO Dad dying and the miracle of the lake should've turned him into some kind of godhead for the cult, it would just make more sense than having a bland, vaguely wellness and community based cult with no real purpose or motive
Also how is this cult not being investigated for multiple disappearances?? It seems they kill most or all of the Salt Festival attendees, and even if those people are all loners with no family or friends and can easily disappear like Celia, they also kill researchers and scientists! And it seems to be public knowledge that the reef eats people! No matter how incompetent the investigative organizations are, there's no way they could've gotten away with this for so long. Even if legally the cult could not be moved, even if the cult did continue their activities, someone should've been trying to stop them, prevent boat travel to the island, etc.
If the author was trying to keep the focus of the story on the cult and pregnancy stuff, I think the reef/murders should've been cut, because there's this kind of unsatisfying gap now where that "how tf are these people getting away with anything?" question is not being answered
Also, a lot of high control groups who do get away with murder/serious crimes have either massive wealth or political power (or both, ahem, Mormons) that they use to slide out of charges, but this group has neither.
Further, what do they achieve here? All cults exist for a reason, usually to satisfy some insatiable need the leader has: money, power, sex, etc. And like, yes, they get money that they seal from Salt Festival victims. William is the top dog (though Easy seems to have quietly usurped him, something we don't find out anything more about!) and gets some respect, and there are orgies and such, but it doesn't seem like it benefits William or anyone else Enough to justify the existence of the cult. William (or Easy, or Dad for that matter) is not sneaking back to the mainland to snort cocaine while speeding around in his Ferrari and buying rolexes. People don't worship him unconditionally and follow his every word to the letter or kill themselves for him. It's implied he's sleeping with multiple people on the commune, but he's not having Mandated Fuck The Cult Leader schedules and all that. Cult leaders by nature push their desires into comical, ridiculous extremes and nothing this cult was doing was working towards fulfilling any goal.
You could say the real cult leader is the coral and it's manipulating all of the islanders into living in this odd manner so they will chuck victims to it, which would be infinitely more interesting, but there's not much textual evidence to back that up since the cult existed before the coral.
I guess it kind of felt like the author knew the building blocks of cults but not how they fit together. Or else they had a really clear idea but we just don't see enough of it through the scattered flashbacks and Celia's heavily restricted narrative
I'm 78 pages into Make Me Better and the cult is a LOT more murdery upfront than I expected. I'm glad Gailey is just going for it, though. I like getting the mixed perspectives of cult members and Celia at the same time, seeing how Easy and Adelaide's knowledge compares to the decade-ish younger Jessie and oblivious Celia. Also, Celia is very well written--she sees the red flags, recognizes them, and then intentionally ignores them when they don't align with her vision of the cult. I wonder what cult podcasts Gailey listens to and if we've heard the same ones...
I LOVED it, which shouldn't be a surprise since I love everything Emily Tesh writes. I also feel like this is the exact book I needed to read at this time, which is always a very good feeling.
Walden was a wonderful main character: smart, good at her job, powerful, a little silly about her romantic life, and utterly blind to any way she might be making the wrong decisions, whether that's with Mark or the Phoenix. She is a victim to one of the more annoying parts of adulthood which is complacency--not just socially or politically but in your own life: you define the boundaries of your life and don't stray outside, and you lose perspective. Walden thinks she is very good at magic, therefore she doesn't see her own folly in binding a demon to herself. She thinks she's an excellent teacher, so she misses the clues that Nicki is going to defy her and do something very stupid and dangerous. She thinks she's mature enough to have a friends with benefits relationship with a mysterious colleague and never questions why he pursues her. And she is the things she thinks she is! She is smart and mature and a wonderful teacher, but that confidence combined with many repetitive years of experience just make her blind to any upcoming problems until they're staring her in the face.
The worldbuilding is also very good--I would love to read a sequel about what Laura and Saffy get up to afterwards (hell, I'd read a 14 book series of Laura's adventures a la Rivers of London). The magic is both identifiably classic and unique and the abstract and identityless demons are a nice change from your Supernatural-esque hot evil humanoids.
I do wish we got a bit more of a slow burn between Laura and Saffy, but I also love the idea that Laura has been pining for her for years and Saffy is just like, wow my new colleague is really weird and annoying and kind of a dumb jock. I really wish we got more Laura overall and she hadn't been kicked out of the story so quickly, but the plot wouldn't have happened if she'd been around.
Overall, 5/5 stars and I can't wait to see what Tesh writes next!
