Review: Spread Me by Sarah Gailey

Rating: 8/10

Kinsey has the perfect job as the team lead in a remote research outpost. She loves the isolation and the way the desert keeps temptations from the civilian world far out of reach.

When her crew discovers a mysterious specimen buried deep in the sand, Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it inside. But the longer it’s there, the more her carefully controlled life begins to unravel. Temptation has found her after all, and it can’t be ignored any longer.

One by one, Kinsey’s team realizes the thing they’re studying is in search of a new host—and one of them is the perfect candidate….

An icky, sticky, oozy thing of a novella, Sarah Gailey’s “Spread Me,” is a good old time. A break-neck single sitting read, Gailey’s latest will wrap its furry tendrils around the reader and force them to confront the four eyed, fork-tongued viral desert people-eater that it is. Packed with some squelchy, glistening body horror and imbued with anxiety distilled from beginning to end, “Spread Me,” despite its horror roots, somehow maintains its sexiness and eroticism, and that is really quite a feat. This revolting delight of a story, this piece of defrosted John Carpenter turned Cronenbergian sleaze, with a cocked hip and a knowing look, is arresting, astounding… arousing? All in all, a deeply unwholesome way to spend an afternoon.

Kinsey and her team are researching at the Kangas Station, which quite conveniently is in the middle of the desert. Domino, Mads, Jaques, Nkrumah and Saskia have found relief, or rather, release in one another, knotting themselves into a sweaty, complex web of mostly sexual relationships. Kinsey, as the team’s leader, does not participate in such shenanigans. It’s on the field one day that they find the specimen, a coyote looking creature with six legs and tongues to spare, and the first mistake they make is bringing it inside. Unwittingly, the group unleash upon themselves the most severe of viruses, starting with a fever, and transcending, descending, I don’t know, into something else entirely. It’s not a bug you or I, dear reader, would want to catch, but Kinsey has a secret. She’s not without sexual drive or immune to desire, she is merely selective about it. As Emily Hughes so beautifully put it to me, what gets her motor running, is viruses. 

Earnestly, this is not a novella that I’ll be raising over Christmas dinner, but I’m struggling to articulate to even the horror-loving peers I’ve spoken to about this one, how on earth “Spread Me,” registers as even mildly erotic. We know the relationship between sex and horror exists and works, academically, but also because we’ve read Barker, Brite, Rumfitt and Piper. “Spread Me,” is adjacent to that lineage, and yet is not by any definition reverent or coy, soft or subtle. It’s freaky and fun and unapologetically gleeful about it. It’s graphic, perhaps not suitable for those with delicate constitutions or rigid expectations of biology, most readers really, with its additional orifices and appendages, and I think the fact that it is so explicit in that respect, in conjunction with the desire, is where the bulk of its horror coagulates. Unapologetically, deeply strange, but purposeful “Spread Me,” is slick and grinning in this overlap, and it’s really sort of fascinating.

Gailey’s prose is impressive, their pacing break-neck, and their affectionate nods to The Thing nothing short of outstanding. This whole novella is in fact, everything I wanted it to be, and then some. With commentary upon relationships, of a romantic and sexual nature, a reminder of the looming existential threat of viruses, the suffocation of isolation, all with that lurid, pulsing centerpiece: a parasitic sex-hungry lichen. Gailey is absolutely not interested in your comfort, they know exactly what this novella is, they know that readers, pretty firmly I imagine, either will or will not enjoy it. “Spread Me,” is confrontational, indulgent and really does not ask for universal affection. I respect it all the more for that. 

Uncompromisingly odd, this is VanderMeer meets Carpenter, filtered through something else, something damp and sporing that I really have yet to come across, and would be hesitant to poke at. I liked this, I liked it a lot. I am… happily compromised. I’m not recommending it to you, but if you’re still here, preferably not out of concern for me, I might, eyebrow raised, quietly slide it to you across the table.