We chat with author Alison Gaylin about her latest release We Are Watching, which is a slick, riveting, and all-too-plausible tale of psychological suspense where a mother is desperate to protect her family as they become targets of a group of violent conspiracy theorists.
PLUS we have the first chapter for you to read at the end of the interview!
Hi, Alison! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’m currently working on my 15th book – which is more shocking to me than anybody. I have had honor of seeing 12 of my own books published, plus two in Robert B. Parker’s Sunny Randall series and one graphic novel, which I co-wrote with Megan Abbott. I love writing dark, psychological suspense, and I always write about the things that scare me most. At the moment, that thing seems to be large groups of people.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve loved entertaining myself by writing stories. As for the ones I loved to read, I devoured every Judy Blume book as a kid. They couldn’t come out fast enough for me. My first “crime fiction” read was The Pit and the Pendulum, by Edgar Allen Poe. I also read Helter Skelter when I was 10… I found it around the house and thought it would be about The Beatles. I guess it was, kind of. Anyway, my life was never the same after that.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss
- The one that made you want to become an author: The Outsiders by SE Hinton
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith
Your latest novel, We Are Watching, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Family targeted by conspiracy theorists.
What can readers expect?
I’ve been told this is my scariest book, and I tend to agree. It’s about a relatively normal family who learns very quickly and horribly that they can’t trust anyone – even people they’ve known for years.
Where did the inspiration for We Are Watching come from?
Several different stories that disturbed me: Pizzagate, where a pizza store owner in DC saw his restaurant incorporated into an elaborate conspiracy theory, which culminated in an armed man bursting into the place looking for trafficked children. Also the McMartin pre-school scandal, which happened in California where I grew up. This poor family lost everything when they were wrongly accused of conducting Satanic rituals in the pre-school they ran. Also heavy metal bands accused of sneaking Satanic content into their lyrics. This list goes on…. Basically, I mashed up Satanic panic of the 80s and more recent online conspiracy theories to create the ideology of the cultists in the book. I realized that this type of thing has been going on for centuries. Since the Salem Witch Trials and before. But the internet has been a powerful accelerant.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Nate, Meg’s father, came as a surprise to me. He is a reclusive, ailing musician who smokes a lot of weed and believes the world is out to get him. I initially hadn’t planned on writing any chapters from his point of view, but plotwise, it made sense. When I started delving into this character, I found him really fun and interesting to write. He’s unlike any character I’ve ever written.
Did you face any challenges? How did you overcome them?
The first draft of this book was completely different from the final product. The only thing that survived from it were Meg and Lily’s names and the very basic idea of a conspiracy theory. Everything else was different – characters, plot, setting. The biggest challenge was taking this outlandish, crazy idea I had and making it feel like it could really happen. In order to accomplish that, I needed characters that truly felt like people you might know, a setting that was very real, etc. That took a lot of finessing and a WHOLE lot of rewriting.
What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned as a writer and about the publishing world since your debut?
Keep your expectations low and your aspirations high. In other words, work your hardest, but don’t expect it to pay off in instant bestsellerdom. Aim for writing the best book you can – nothing more, nothing less. Also, write what you would want to read – don’t try and follow trends. Oh, and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite.
What’s next for you?
I’m currently at work on Booked, my third Sunny Randall book. It comes out in the early fall.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up in 2025?
Laura Lippman’s Murder Takes a Vacation, Alafair Burke’s The Note, Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive, Wendy Corsi Staub’s The Fourth Girl, Lisa Unger’s Close Your Eyes and Count to Ten, William Boyle’s Saint of the Narrows Street (which I read and loved in galley form)… it’s a long list, and those are just books from the first part of the year!
Will you be picking up We Are Watching? Tell us in the comments below and read on to discover the first chapter!
Chapter 1
One
It’s been the longest day of Meg Russo’s life, and it isn’t even half over. Her stomach gnaws at her, her hands heavy on the wheel. But when she glances at the clock on the dashboard, she sees that it’s a little shy of 11:30 a.m., which means that Meg, her husband, Justin, and their daughter, Lily, have only been on the road for an hour. They’ve got at least three more hours on the thruway, and then they’ll have to contend with the series of veinlike country roads Meg and Justin haven’t traversed since their own college days. If they don’t hit too much traffic or take a wrong turn, they should be in Ithaca by five, which now feels like some point in a future so distant, Meg is incapable of envisioning it.
Time is strange that way, the past eighteen years zooming by in an instant, all of it leading up to a single day that’s already lasted eons. Meg blames the stress of last night, wanting everything to be perfect for their daughter’s send-off, which led to thoughts of Lily’s first visit home for Thanksgiving break, which in turn made Meg think for the millionth time about how cold their house gets in the fall, and how Lily always complains about it. New windows, Meg had thought, lying in bed with her eyes open, envisioning insulated windows to replace those paper-thin sheets of glass, the same windows that were here when she and Justin bought the place twenty years ago—and it was a fixer-upper then. What if Lily could come home to insulated windows? Meg mused, still wide awake in the wee hours of the morning. Will she have changed by then? Will she have grown too sophisticated to get excited over a warmer house? And so on, until the sky was pink and it was time to wake up and Meg had barely slept at all.
They ate a too-early breakfast of coffee and grocery store bagels, and then they tackled the load-in, which was a pain in more ways than one. They all did their share, Meg, Justin and Lily. But Meg’s lower back has been temperamental since she hit her mid-forties, a sad fact that no amount of yoga has been able to fix.
It still burns from lugging all of Lily’s dorm room essentials into their Subaru—the filled-to-bursting suitcases and garbage bags and hampers stuffed with towels and bedding and detergents and toiletries; Lily’s wireless headphones and laptop, her keyboard and electric bass and guitar and amp and the tangled collection of cables necessitated by all of them; the tubes filled with posters advertising people and things Meg can’t wrap her head around Lily’s love for: speed-metal bands and experimental-jazz musicians, pro wrestlers from the nineties and Jinkx Monsoon the drag queen. Well, actually, she does like Jinkx Monsoon, who is funny as hell and does a mean Judy Garland impersonation. But beyond that and their mutual desire for a warmer house, Meg and her daughter just don’t share much in the way of interests anymore.
She glances at Lily in the rearview, wedged up against the window to make room for her amp and keyboard, as well as a crate full of cables and computer equipment that reminds Meg of the spaceship interior from Alien. Lily’s profile is so like Justin’s—the strong jaw, the soft brow, the regal Roman nose. It’s not something that most people notice, since she more obviously resembles Meg, with her dark, curly hair and pale, freckled skin and steel-gray eyes that truly are identical to hers, down to the yellow flecks around the pupil. She’s your mini-me, Meg’s Facebook friends always comment when she posts a picture of her daughter. But it’s only genetics, and genetics are shallow. Meg has no idea what’s going on behind those eyes. She hasn’t for years.
She’ll come back again, Justin has said to her, late at night in the quiet of their bedroom. She’s spreading her wings. It’s natural. She’ll circle back, and we’ll be here.
When Lily was a kid, she was an avid reader who spent nearly as much time in her parents’ bookstore, the Secret Garden, as Meg and Justin did themselves. The three of them would devour young adult series together and discuss them over dinner—their own private book club. Lily’s bedroom was a library, filled with hardcovers and paperbacks and the advance galleys Meg and Justin would bring home. Fantasies were her favorite. Anything with a dragon in it. She’d read these books in a day, then place them carefully on her shelves, the spines unbent, the pages unfolded, lending them out only to the most trusted friends. Her personal treasures.
But five minutes later, Lily hit age fourteen and abandoned books for music—the bass, of all things, following in the footsteps of the grandfather she barely knew. Dove headfirst into it, same as she’d done with reading. Made it her new passion, because Lily was someone who had passions rather than hobbies. One of the few times he visited, Meg’s father caught sight of Lily in the dim light of her bedroom, amp unplugged, headphones on, her fingers a blur as they plucked the thick strings and danced over the frets. She practices like a boy, Nathan had said, which had made Meg roll her eyes. (If there was any man on the planet more obliviously sexist than her weed-smoking, antiestablishment, rock musician father, Meg had yet to meet him.)
As a teen, Lily took up other instruments—keyboards, drums (a little). With money she saved from working behind the counter at the Secret Garden, she bought a used electric guitar for the sole purpose of writing songs.
She acquired a new set of friends—boys, mostly, with sullen faces and long, skinny bodies and hair that hung resolutely in their eyes. They were polite; Lily’s friends have always been polite. But unlike the squealing, bookish little girls who used to come over for slumber parties, they seemed to prefer music to speaking. After school most days, they would show up at the Russos’ house, these hulking boys with their electronic drums and sleek keyboards, guitar cases clutched in their hands like weapons. They’d grab sodas out of the fridge and make a beeline for the converted basement to practice their defiantly uncatchy songs. Music came first for Lily, which made her hard and unreachable in a way that Meg never could have imagined.
Sometimes, Meg would lean against the basement stairwell and watch Lily, curls snaking down her back, those lightning-fast and calloused fingers working of their own accord, head bobbing to rhythms too complicated for Meg to keep up with. It reminded her of when she was a child herself, watching her father in his home recording studio. It made her feel the same way, as though she’d come in contact with a different species, more advanced and slightly hostile.
Meg glances in the rearview mirror, hoping to catch her daughter’s eye, but Lily’s put on her headphones now. Her eyes are closed.
When are you going to circle back? Make it soon, okay?
“What kind do you want?” Justin says. It takes Meg a little while to remember that twenty seconds ago, before she got lost in this thought spiral, she’d told her husband she was hungry and he’d dug into the floor of the back seat and fished the bag of sandwiches out of the tote they’d packed together this morning. It’s why Meg checked the time in the first place—because she’s never been so hungry this early in the day.
“Um . . .” Meg says. The truth is, she wants a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but they just packed one, and since Lily is now vegan, it’s the only thing she can eat. Meg tells Justin she’ll take a ham and cheese, and he gives her a half, carefully pulling back the wrapping so she can eat and drive at the same time. Her stomach growls. She takes a bite, then shifts into the left lane to get past the tractor trailer in front of them.
“How about you, kiddo?” Justin says. “You want a half sandwich?”
Lily doesn’t answer, so he turns around in his seat and says it louder.
“Huh?” She slips off her headphones and opens her eyes. “Oh, sorry. No thanks, Dad. I’m not really hungry yet.”
“Too excited to eat?”
Lily blinks at him.
“You know . . . college?”
“Oh,” she says. “Yeah. Sure. Mom, please watch the road.”
“Hey,” Meg says, keeping it light. “I’ve been driving for thirty years, you know.”
“Mom.”
Meg exhales hard. “Okay, okay.”
“You’re going to love it,” Justin says. Ithaca is his alma mater. Meg went to Cornell. Lily applied to and was accepted by both, but Ithaca’s music program, combined with the scholarship money they offered, made the choice a no-brainer. Meg knows what Justin’s thinking—Lily should be excited, and nervous. Instead of criticizing Meg’s driving, she should be asking the two of them a million questions about what to expect during orientation. But that isn’t her way, which Justin knows as well as Meg, even if he doesn’t take it as personally.
And so Justin turns to his old standby. “Did I ever tell you the story of how Mom and I met?” he says.
“No, Dad. You haven’t.” Lily says it like a sigh. Justin has told this story dozens of times since she was a little girl. It’s a common refrain at this point—Lily pretending she doesn’t know the story, Justin launching in, faux grudgingly, Meg filling in the blanks. As a child, Lily used to nag him to tell it, but these days it’s more the other way around.
“Okay, if you insist,” Justin says.
In the rearview, Meg sees flashing brights, so she speeds up enough to put some distance between the tractor trailer and herself and slips back into the right lane. She’s usually not one to drag her heels in the fast lane, but she’s in another world today. Too much on her mind.
Justin, meanwhile, is telling Lily the story yet again, about how both he and Meg were seniors, how she’d taken a filmmaking class at Ithaca for fun, how he noticed “this beautiful English major” right away and tried in vain to get her attention—which he finally earned as a result of winning the “coveted Golden Doorknob Award.”
Meg waits. Lily giggles. “What’s the Golden Doorknob Award?” she says, just like always. Meg’s heart swells.
Not everything changes . . .
“You want to take that one, honey?” Justin says.
Meg smiles. “The Golden Doorknob Award,” she says, “is given out once a year to the short film, made by an Ithaca student, featuring the most creative and effective use of a doorknob as murder weapon.”
“And Dad won.”
“That he did.”
Behind Meg, someone blares their horn—a long lean-on that makes her want to jump out of her skin, followed by three short, angry blasts. “What the hell?” she says.
“What was that? Morse code?” Justin says.
“Assholes,” Lily says.
Meg thinks she hears the horn again, this time to her left. Her shoulders stiffen. So many idiots on the road. “Anyway, I wish you still had that movie, honey. It really was great, Lily.”
“I’ll find it,” Justin says. “I’ll find it, and we can screen it at Lily’s wedding.”
Meg laughs.
The horn blasts again.
“Go away!” Lily says.
Meg turns around. “What?”
“Those guys in the Mazda,” Lily says. “They’re the ones honking. I thought we lost them.”
“Which guys?”
“They’ve been creeping on me since we got on the thruway.”
“Left lane?” Justin says.
“Don’t look,” Lily replies. “Just ignore them. They were staring at me. Taking pictures. They’re gross.”
Meg’s stomach tightens. “They were harassing you?”
“Not harassing, Mom. Jeez. Why do you have to make it so dramatic?”
“Taking pictures is harassment,” Meg says, her fingers tightening on the wheel.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” Justin says.
“Because you guys would do what you’re doing right now and make it bigger than it is.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Meg sees a tan chassis, the glint of a window. A car keeping pace with her own.
“Just drive,” Lily says. “They’ll go away.”
Meg can feel eyes through the driver’s side window. The burn of a gaze. She turns and looks. The passenger’s face is right up against the Mazda’s window. Not even trying to be subtle about it. “That’s an adult,” Meg says.
“Stop looking at him,” Lily says.
The man at the window is at least ten years older than Lily. He’s got a buzz cut. Tattoos. He isn’t wearing a shirt. The car is a four-door, and there’s a similar-looking guy in the window behind him, this one in some kind of tank top or sleeveless T-shirt. Craning their necks to see through the Subaru’s windows, watching their car like it’s some sporting event on TV. How dare they? Staring at her like that, like there’s nothing wrong with it. Like it’s their absolute right to stare.
Justin says, “What are they? Skinheads?”
“Please, you guys, stop!” Lily says.
Anger bubbles beneath Meg’s skin. It roils in her veins. Her hand slips to the window button. She presses it, a blast of cool air ruffling her hair. “Leave her alone!” she shouts. “She’s barely eighteen, you perverts!”
“Mom!”
“Lily’s right, honey,” Justin says. “Close the window. Keep your eyes on the road. Don’t get us in an accident over these lowlifes.”
Meg closes her window. Grits her teeth. “Sorry,” she says. According to the GPS, there’s an exit in another five miles.
Justin says, “Oh, Jesus.”
“What?” Meg says. “What?”
“Nothing.”
“They’re doing it again,” Lily says. “Don’t look.”
“Meg, don’t engage with these jerks.”
“I said not to look. Dad, why won’t she listen to me?”
Meg barely hears them. All she can see are the two skinheads at the Mazda’s windows, phones raised to their faces. Taking pictures. She opens the window again, the cold air slapping her hair against her face. “Stop it!” The words get lost in the wind.
There are more of them in the car. More phones raised. As though her family is a hockey game or a reality show or animals in a zoo. As though they’re nothing more than a form of entertainment. “I hate them,” Meg whispers.
“Pay attention to the road, Meg,” Justin says. “You’re swerving all over the place.”
“Put those fucking phones down!” Meg shrieks, her anger surprising her. She sounds like her father.
“Mom, stop!”
“Speed up.” Justin’s voice is calm. The only calm voice in the car. “Don’t engage with these lunatics.”
Meg’s back is stiff. Her throat aches. Her hands tremble on the wheel. “Why won’t they stop?”
“Speed up!” Justin says. Meg realizes she’s going just under sixty-five miles per hour, keeping perfect pace with the Mazda.
“Mom!”
“Okay,” she whispers. “Okay. I’m calm now. I’m sorry.” Meg turns back to the road, her foot pressing the accelerator, taking it up to seventy-five, eighty.
The Mazda speeds up too, then pulls ahead of Meg, shifting into her lane. “They’re passing us,” Justin says. “Thank God.”
Meg lifts her foot. The car slows down. The Mazda pulls away.
Lost them, she thinks.
“Finally,” Justin says.
“Mom, in the future, can you please not do that?”
Meg exhales, the tension starting to ease out of her. “I don’t know what got into me,” she says.
“Mama Bear.” Justin laughs. He pats Meg on the knee. “It’s nature.”
“It’s not funny, Dad. Those guys were psychos and Mom just . . . Fuck. That’s them.”
The Mazda has slowed down. It’s right in front of them. Meg can make out two faces pressed against the back window. Bald heads. Phones up. Meg’s breathing fails her. A shiver travels down her back, her legs. A raw, primal fear.
It’s nature.
The sandwich drops from her hand. It surprises her that she’s been holding it the entire time. This stupid ham sandwich. There’s lettuce stuck to her shirt. Justin says something she can’t hear or doesn’t want to hear for the thoughts racing through her head: This is awful. Something awful is happening.
One of them moves. The Mazda’s rear window opens and he’s oozing out of it. Head, shoulders, bare chest. Facing them, the wind in his face. His phone in his hand, a weapon.
“Get down, Lily,” Meg says.
“I can’t. There’s too much stuff.”
“Get down,” Justin says.
Meg starts to move into the left lane, but a horn blares at her and she swerves back, overcorrecting, her front tires skidding on something, the front bumper swinging too far to the right. “No,” she says. “No, no, no . . .”
“Mom, what are you doing!”
“I don’t know,” Meg says. “I don’t know what’s happening . . .”
“Okay, okay,” Justin says. “Just. Just try and . . . Just . . .”
The car is spinning now. Everything in slow motion. Meg can see every face in every window of every car around them—the old man in the tractor trailer. An angelic-looking kid in a red pickup, his jaw dropped open. The sick fucks in the Mazda. The lights on their phones, that shirtless one half out the window.
Has time slowed because I’m dying? Are we all going to die?
Something’s come loose. Something deep within the car. A connection has failed, rendering it useless, and Meg can no longer drive. It’s like trying to control a roller skate, the tires rebelling against the steering wheel, just moving, skidding across the thruway and onto the shoulder and over the side. Lily screams.
I’ll save you. I’ll save you, baby.
“Wait,” Justin says. “Please.”
The steering wheel is as pointless as a toy.
The car plummets, everything turning, up down, down up. The car on its back, the seat belt cutting into her chest, Meg’s arm twisting behind her, bending, the snap of it. She’s bleeding. She feels the heat of her own blood running down her arm, slick on her hand. Her face stings, as though she’s been attacked by bees. The taste of hot metal in her mouth. A searing pain shoots up her arm, and then it goes numb and still everything spins. Her stomach seizes up. She tries to find Justin, Lily. She calls out their names, but her mouth is full of blood.
“Daddy!”
The car stops and there is nothing but silence. Meg makes herself look at the passenger’s seat. It’s empty. She remembers Justin pulling the tote bag out of the back seat, unfastening his seat belt to reach it. No, she says. But she can’t say it. She can’t speak for the pain, the blood in her mouth.
Lily is sobbing now.
No. Please, no.
She catches sight of her husband’s body on the grass just past the car. The windshield is shattered, and Justin is on his stomach, a constellation of shards around him, glittering. The jeans Meg teases him about. Too baggy. Her eyes find the back of his head, the blue-and-white striped shirt she gave him last Christmas. Brings out your eyes. She’s never seen Justin so thoroughly still.
“Daddy!”
Meg’s gaze rests on Justin’s motionless arm. His wedding ring. Must get to him. She tries to unlock the car with her good arm, her fingers trembling. Must get . . . The airbag deploys late, late as everything else in this useless, failing car. The useless, late airbag socks Meg in the face, and she can’t get to Justin. She’ll never get to Justin. It isn’t fair, she thinks. It just isn’t fair.
And all she can hear are her daughter’s sobs.
