CR 032: Alison Gaylin on Conspiracy Theorists, Witch Hunts, and Her Scariest Book Yet
The bestselling author discusses her latest thriller, “We Are Watching.”
Despite being only four weeks in, this year has been an anxiety-fueled, chaotic nightmare full of conspiracies, lies, and paranoia. Which makes Alison Gaylin’s latest page-turning thriller, We Are Watching, utterly apropos. (In fact, in its review, Kirkus referred to it as “timely, terrifying, and all too plausible.”)
The book tells the story of Meg Russo, who returns to work three months after the death of her husband, only to find that she and her daughter are being targeted by a group of violent conspiracy theorists. Gaylin says she was driven to write the novel because she finds “large groups of people believing something very firmly [to be] very frightening. ... I think one of the scariest things around today are large groups of people who are firmly entrenched in one belief or another.”
Over the course of her career, Gaylin has published numerous bestselling novels, received an Edgar Award (for If I Die Tonight) and a Shamus Award (for And She Was), collaborated with Megan Abbott on the graphic novel Normandy Gold, and published many short stories. In addition to her own original writing, she has continued the work of Robert B. Parker and Mike Lupica by taking over Parker’s Sunny Randall series. (Her next book in the series is due out in September.)
I recently chatted with Gaylin over Zoom about her writing process, the research conducted for We Are Watching, and her many influences.
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SANDRA EBEJER: I want to start by asking about your background. When did you know you wanted to be a writer?
ALISON GAYLIN: I wanted to be a writer ever since I was a young kid. I’m an only child and I was shy and awkward when I was growing up, so writing stories was a way to escape. When I was in high school, I got a B in English, and I was very upset about this. I asked [my teacher] about it, and she said she only gives A’s to people who will one day write professionally, which absolutely crushed me. So, I studied theater in college, but I was still drawn to writing. I was doing the playwriting program, and after that, I was always in fiction writing groups. I mean, writing can be torturous, it can be the most difficult thing in the world, but it’s also brought me the most joy. There are very few things that I’m good at, so I’m gonna stick with it. [Laughs]
Where did the idea for We Are Watching come from?
When I was younger in Southern California, there was the McMartin preschool case. It took place in the ’80s, and it was one of the things that sparked this satanic panic, where people were saying that these daycare people were worshiping the devil and conducting rites and abuse of children, et cetera, et cetera. These people who ran the McMartin preschool were accused of insane things that had all been started by a kid—everything from having secret tunnels under the school where they sacrificed animals and sexually abused children to flying through the air on brooms. Things that are actually impossible. This spread. It was a trial that lasted seven years. It destroyed this family who ran the preschool. And they were just normal people, but they were never the same after that. So that was one of the inspirations for me.
The other was how this type of thinking has accelerated with the Internet. I was thinking of Pizzagate and QAnon and these groups that form. You have enough people saying something that sounds so crazy is right, and you start to think that it is right. So it was the idea of these modern-day witch hunts and the effect of the Internet, and how it can accelerate and weaponize these feelings and grow so fast. I was thinking, “What would happen if a normal family became subject to this? Somebody who wasn’t a celebrity with access to security?” That was what inspired me.
With this book, it’s very difficult, as the reader, to know who to trust. You find yourself questioning every character, in the same way that the protagonist, Meg, has to question them. Was it difficult to live in that world during the writing of the book?
It’s funny, because a lot of writers say, “I got scared writing my book! I scared myself.” And I’ve never had that experience until this book. I got frightened writing it. I like writing about things that scare me. I like scaring people. And I definitely think this is my scariest book. It’s such an outlandish premise, but if you create people that are real enough and put them in this world, it becomes plausible and frightening.
Did you have to do much research into conspiracy theorists for this book?
I did a little. I listened to podcasts, watched documentaries, et cetera, about QAnon and Pizzagate, but the thing that interested me is QAnon and conspiracy theories were born on message boards—4chan, which became 8chan. I did look through these message boards, and I’d never seen anything like it. There’s all kinds of horrible hate speech and really awful misogynist stuff on there. You want to take a shower afterwards. But it’s a place where people can anonymously connect with each other. It’s where Q posted his first missive for QAnon. And so I did look through these message boards just to see what they were like.
At one point, one of the characters, Nathan, says, “You don’t know as much about the world as you think you do. It’s full of monsters. And when you put your art out there, it feeds them.” Have you had to deal much with trolls or haters in your writing career?
It’s interesting. I’ve had haters and people like that. But the idea that a belief system has formed around you—my husband has had this experience. Back in 1994 a movie came out called No Escape, and my husband wrote it. It was very loosely based on a book, and he wrote the script. It starred Ray Liotta, and it was about an all-male futuristic prison colony. Strangely enough, my husband included something in there about an event in Benghazi—he just thought the name sounded interesting—and that sounded like what actually happened in Benghazi years later. The movie was also set in 2022 and in 2022 its star, Ray Liotta, passed away. So there were people who started discovering this and writing my husband, thinking that he had somehow predicted the future with this movie. That was another idea that inspired me. But it wasn’t frightening. It was just so strange that there were people that believed this about this thing that he wrote a million years ago. It was an action movie. He wasn’t trying to prophesize. But people happen upon these things, especially with the Internet.
In the acknowledgements, you write that your first book sold 20 years ago. Since that time, social media and smartphones have infiltrated our lives. Things are, in many ways, very different than they were back then. Do you find that the publishing industry has changed much?
It definitely has, especially in terms of marketing and publicity. There’s so many different ways to promote your book. The one good thing about the Internet is there are so many more ways to spread the word, and books can really catch on on social media. My last book, The Collective, was chosen as a Book of the Month, and there has been such a resurgence of Book of the Month Club among younger people. It became popular on Instagram, TikTok, places like that. When I first started, there were only a few different venues where you could receive reviews—newspapers, blogs—but now it’s wider spread. I think people have achieved fame and great success without having their book on the cover of The New York Times Book Review. And I feel like there are more people out there who really want to read, for whatever reason, and escape into fiction.
You’re the first author I’ve interviewed who has written books for a series that you didn’t originate. Can you tell me how you got involved with the Sunny Randall series and how it’s been to continue the work that was started by another author?
It’s been really fun. I’m actually working on another Sunny Randall book right now. My agent was approached by the agent for the Robert B. Parker estate. Mike Lupica, who was writing the Sunny Randall books, was moving over to write the Spencer books as well as Jesse Stone, so they needed somebody to write Sunny Randall, who was Parker’s only female character. I’m the first woman after two men writing this female character, so it’s a challenge and really fun at the same time. Anyway, my agent was approached by their agent, and they just told me to write 20 pages of a Sunny Randall book. That was it. No direction, nothing. I had read Spencer books before. I hadn’t read Sunny Randall, so I read a couple of Parker’s books and Lupica’s books, and I tried to pick up the style. This idea came to me about Instagram influencers, so I wrote 20 pages and then I got the job, which thrilled me.
They’re very different than my books. They’re not quite as dark and they’re always first person. They’re classic detective novels, so they’re fun to write. They’re an escape from my regular writing, and the characters are so wonderful. Parker created these amazing characters. He wrote very diverse casts within his book at a time when most detective stories were all just straight white men. So it’s fun for me to take these great characters that are a wonderful toolbox to work with, make stories out of them, and try my best to write in that style.
How do you balance your own novels with that work?
I feel like I’ve been influenced by writing the Parker books, because his books are so heavy on dialogue. I think my own books have increased in dialogue since I’ve started doing the Parker books. It’s hard to move from one to the other, because my voice is entirely different. I have a lot more internal monologue than he does, so going back and forth is a challenge. Before I started doing the Parker books, I was working for entertainment magazines—In Touch Weekly, Us Weekly, celebrity gossip magazines. They have their own voice, too. So in a way, it’s like that. I would turn on a certain part of my brain to write gossip stories and then turn on another part of my brain to write my dark thrillers. So shifting back and forth is a bit of a challenge, but in a way, it’s kind of a refresh.
What is your approach when you’re writing a novel? Do you plot things out in advance? Do you know how things will end before the book begins?
When I first started, I would do a detailed outline of every book, and I would always go off the outline. It seemed like a waste of time. I think the whole secret to creating twists is surprising yourself, which is hard to do when you’re working from a set outline. What I like to think is that I know where the book is going to end up, and I know the basic points, what the midpoint would be, and then outline a few chapters ahead. I think it was [E.L.] Doctorow who said, “You’re driving at night, and you’ve got your headlights on, and that’s as far as you see ahead in your book.” That, to me, seems to be the most fun way to write a book and also the best way to come up with a surprising plot. That said, my second drafts are so different than my first drafts. My first drafts are terrible, and I feel sorry for my agent and my editor and my husband who have to read them. But in a way that serves as my outline that I end up going off of in my second draft when I’m really trying to tighten the pacing and move things around. And a lot of times I come up with entirely different ideas for the second draft to make what I’m trying to say a little more effective.
Who are some of your influences? Who are some of the writers that you go to for inspiration?
Mary Higgins Clark—as far as pacing goes, I don’t think anybody can beat the book Where Are the Children? It’s so beautifully paced. You cannot stop turning pages. I love Patricia Highsmith. I’ve always loved the way she writes psychological suspense. James M. Cain, Edgar Allan Poe—those were some early influences. There’s so many wonderful writers that are out today that I love to read, and I get so excited whenever their books come out: Laura Lippman, Megan Abbott, Alafair Burke, Wendy Corsi Staub, Kellye Garrett. There’s so many great writers out there that a new book of theirs will come out and it’ll be inspiring to me.
What advice would you have for aspiring novelists?
I would say, like everybody says, just be persistent. Don’t let the critics get you down. Don’t let the rejections get you down. The great thing about writing is you can rewrite, so if you’re getting constructive criticism, view it as a gift, not as some kind of weapon. Take it. Rewrite. Think about what you can do to tell the best story you possibly can. There are very few things that you can redo. You can’t redo a brain surgery. You’re kind of screwed that way. But if you are writing, you can rewrite. It’s the most wonderful thing of writing. Don’t rewrite yourself to death, but if you’re submitting to agents or publishers or beta readers, and you’re getting the same type of criticism, think, “Maybe I can do something with this.” Use it, rewrite, put in the work, be persistent, but also be ready to do a lot of hard work.
If you could go back to the start of your career, knowing what you know now, would you do anything differently?
What I would do is lower my expectations. My first book was called Hide Your Eyes, and it was a mass market paperback original. I told my editor at the time, “I can’t wait to be reviewed in The New York Times!” And she just laughed at me for a full minute. She said, “That’s not going to happen.” But she also said I wouldn’t be nominated for an Edgar, and I was nominated for an Edgar with that book. But anyway, I think I would lower my [expectations]. My motto in life these days is, “Low expectations, high aspirations.” Work really hard but keep your expectations low, and then you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
To learn more about Alison Gaylin, find her on Instagram.
To purchase We Are Watching, click here.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
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