Spread Me by Sarah Gailey Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via Edelweiss
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: horror, science fiction horror
Pages: 208
Published by Tor Nightfire on September 23, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Spread Me is a darkly seductive tale of survival from Sarah Gailey, after a routine probe at a research station turns deadly when the team discovers a strange specimen in search of a warm place to stay.
Kinsey has the perfect job as the team lead in a remote research outpost. She loves the solitude, and the way the desert keeps her far away from the temptations teeming out in the civilian world.
When her crew discovers a mysterious specimen buried deep in the sand, Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it into the hab. But the longer it's inside, 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....
My Review:
I’m going to get at this oddly, but then it’s been an odd week, and this is an odd book. So all the oddness is VERY apropos.
It’s just turned out to be an “I can’t even” week, for reasons that have nothing to do with this book. But I was grasping at straws for something to read to get out of my slump, and this, well, I’ve bounced off the description (and the Goodreads reviews) multiple times but it was short and it looked ‘interesting’ for potentially euphemistic definitions of interesting so I picked it up and got sucked right damn in and here we are.
The story is reminiscent of John Carpenter’s 1982 movie, The Thing. Which I haven’t seen because horror isn’t usually my jam, but the reference is lampshaded repeatedly in the book so I had to look for a summary and there are PLENTY of those on the internet because the movie has become a ‘cult classic’.
But that’s not where I came into this story from. I came in from two recent SF horror thrillers, Symbiote by Michael Nayak and The Glass Garden by Jessica Levai – and I think they are actually a bit closer to this, pardon me, thing because of the more overt SFnal setup AND the even more overt explorations of the sexuality of the characters and their interpersonal and/or extremely fluid and sometimes outright intersexual relationships.
Both Symbiote and Glass Garden, like Spread Me, are about extremely isolated scientific exploration groups. And how that small isolated group couples and decouples and recouples and they do stupid things to, for and with each other because they are all they’ve got. Including letting something dangerous into their closed environment that they really, really shouldn’t have – which kicks off all of these stories.
But these are also stories about secrets that bite everyone in the ass – if not quite as literally as occurs in Spread Me. Because Kinsey’s secret (and her name turns out to be a huge hint about her motivations and reactions) is that she seems to be asexual when it comes to humans, but is sexually attracted to things that most humans do their damndest not to consider sexual at all.
There are no actual tentacles, but Kinsey is aroused by viruses – and that’s precisely the nature of the ‘thing’ that has just invaded their desert outpost. Leaving Kinsey, not just on the horns of a dilemma, but intensely horny as well. Which the virus is all too aware of, even as it goes about ‘wooing’ her in all the worst ways possible.
And manages, somehow, to both fail big and ultimately succeed at the same, horrifying, time.
Escape Rating B+: While this is a bit of a mixed feelings review, because this story is just plain weird, it did break a terrible reading slump and that counts for a LOT. It certainly counts for enough to elevate a B to a B+ rating.
Also and definitely howsomever, the reviews I’ve read have tended to focus on the virus-romance aspects of the story, which are, admittedly, hard to miss. Even the title is a reference to Kinsey’s overt horniness about the thing. But in the actual reading of the story, it’s not quite the way the reviews led me to believe. There’s more story than that and it’s honestly weirder because of it.
Because it’s not that Kinsey actually has sex with the virus. It’s that she imagines it – and she imagines it a LOT. So it’s about what arouses her and what she imagines it would be like to have that arousal sated by the being she desires, BUT her imagined erotica still kinda reads human because it’s through her own imagination. (Words may be mush in this instance, but she’s inside her own head and it’s all about what she imagines it would be like and her frame of reference is very, well, human.)
When the virus tries to do and be what it thinks Kinsey wants, that’s a) where the horror comes in and b) really, truly wrong in ways that are also reminiscent of humans because that’s what the virus is mimicking. The virus is more than a bit like an overeager suitor who keeps trying to be what it thinks Kinsey wants instead of asking what she actually wants and it fails at mindreading just as humans do.
But, on a third hand that this thing can manifest so very easily, in its many and varied attempts it ALSO represents the full spectrum of human sexuality and human gender representation – even if none of those are remotely what Kinsey wants from it. Particularly considering the cost.
And that cost is where the horror definitely comes in, as the already tiny population of this remote outpost succumbs, one by one, to the virus and its ability to not merely infect but outright replace every single creature it comes across. Ad infinitum. Forever and ever, amen.
Unless it can be content with just having Kinsey – and vice versa. Instead of ALL the rest of us.
Because just like the people in that outpost, we won’t recognize the danger until it’s already far too late. But then, humans are like that, aren’t they?
