We Are Watching
Alison Gaylin
Harper Collins, 2025, $14.99
Driving your 18-year-old to college is poignant, and Meg Russo is thinking some long thoughts behind the wheel as she and her husband Justin drive their Lily to Ithaca from the small Catskills town where they own a bookstore. The long-awaited journey, momentous and mundane, is shattered in a few moments when a Mazda packed with thugs starts playing a weird game of Thruway chicken, driving far too close, snapping photos of Lily.
Enraged and frightened, Meg loses control of the Subaru. Justin is killed instantly in the crash, and Meg and Lily—who’ve grown apart during Lily’s teen years, when Lily’s interests turned from novels to playing the bass—are left to mourn and pick up such pieces as they can back in Elizabethville, the little town with just a couple shops where everybody knows everybody—or so it seems on the surface.
Meg’s bookstore, the Secret Garden, has been thriving here for four decades, founded by her parents, given an early boost by her father Nate’s moderate renown as bass player in an `80s prog rock band. Reopening the store three months after the accident, she’s still an achy mess both emotionally and physically. Her coworkers and regulars are thrilled to have her back. But the day, which would never have been easy, is marred by the weird behavior of a stranger taking pictures from across the street, eerily reminiscent of the guys in the Mazda that day.
From there, the insanity just escalates. Without her husband, Meg is forced to recalibrate her remaining family relationships: with Lily, who feels to Meg like an impenetrable mystery, and with Nate, who feels like a burden. He’s living alone in an even more remote mountain town, his physical health is sketchy, and he’s given to ranting about things that make no sense to his daughter. Gaylin deftly shifts her narration among the three generations, letting us understand them better than they understand one another, and as the truly weird sense of menace begins to build, each has his or her own pieces of the larger puzzle to share—if they can find the words.
Why have people been taking photos and videos of the Secret Garden? Surely, Meg believes, the fatal accident was simply driver error. Wasn’t it? But who is the woman who intoned “You will pay for your sins” right before Justin’s untimely death and returns to say, “one down, three to go?” What’s up with the mysterious sequence of numbers on her Facebook page? It’s post-Covid; everyone’s a little nuts, especially online. Surely these strange moments have no connection to the “wolves” Nate rants about.
The truth, as it slowly becomes clear, is far darker and stupider than Meg or any sane soul could ever have imagined. To face it and survive, she’ll have to stop assuming that her daughter’s just high and her father’s just paranoid. The wolves, it turns out, really are at the door—and all over the place, anonymous online, hiding in plain sight in everyday life . A conspiracy theory with roots back in Nate’s days in the spotlight has grown creepy-crawly legs on the internet, and there exist a fair number of humans who are utterly convinced that this bookish, musical little family is poised to destroy all human life and must be violently stopped. Some of those humans are far too close for comfort.
Gaylin gives voice to ailing, haunted rocker Nate, stifled fantasy-writer-turned-bookstore-owner Meg, and Lily, navigating 21st-century young adulthood with heart and style, all three fine, kind people, with depth and precision. We feel their love and frustration, ache with gratitude as they fumble toward connection, and root for each of them as they face up to the cold, hard, weird and dangerous facts: They’ve been targeted by a delusional, bloodthirsty online cult.
In stark contrast to the slightly askew but deeply caring family that the stalkers believe they must kill, Gaylin sketches the mindset of the people who gang up to bully others and traces the way things can start with a misunderstanding, escalate to revenge, and turn deadly with sociopathy as an accelerant. Gaylin, who’s written 13 books and won multiple awards, speaks fluent Catskills, nails the current moment, and never lets her deft social commentary get in the way of a plot that moves smooth and swift as a bullet train.
This article appears in January 2025.
