Spread Me
by Sarah Gailey
Kinsey runs a small, isolated research station in the middle of a desert. The isolation is deliberate. She’s good at her job, and being out here keeps her far away from the parts of herself she doesn’t trust. When her team discovers a mysterious specimen buried deep in the sand, Kinsey breaks quarantine and brings it inside. The organism is not dead. It’s looking for a host. And it knows exactly what everyone in that hab wants.
“How many of me is still me? At what point does me become us, and us become nothing?”
What It Actually Felt Like
Okay. I want to be upfront: this book is explicitly erotic. The blurb doesn’t fully prepare you for that, and I think that’s doing potential readers a disservice. It’s being marketed on The Thing energy, and yes, there’s an isolated station, a thing that shouldn’t be inside, mounting paranoia about who’s infected, all of it. But Gailey’s version is horny in a way that is deliberate and thematic, not just flavor. The virus spreads through desire. Kinsey took a job in the middle of nowhere to get away from her own wanting, and then the wanting found her anyway. That’s the whole book. That’s what it’s about.
The desert setting does something interesting for the isolation angle. Instead of Antarctic claustrophobia it’s heat and open space and the specific loneliness of nowhere. The research team dynamics are built efficiently through flashbacks woven into the present-day horror, so you understand who these people are to each other without a lot of setup time. When the paranoia kicks in, the question of who’s already been affected hits differently because you’ve actually been made to care about the people involved.
What Gailey is doing underneath the explicit content is asking something real about shame and desire and bodily autonomy and who gets to decide what your body does. The near-future setting (pandemics are routine, masking is normal, and yet Kinsey can’t stand the distance it requires) adds a layer that made me think more than I expected to. There are moments that genuinely unsettled me. The organism’s logic is consistent and specific in a way that makes it more disturbing, not less.
The Honest Part
Three stars for me is a personal read, not a quality read. Erotic horror is an acquired taste and even knowing what I was getting into, the execution was a little uneven. Some scenes land exactly the way they’re meant to. Some felt like they were working harder than necessary to make a point that had already been made. It’s a 208-page novella that occasionally felt longer than its page count.
Who This Is For
Sex-positive horror readers and fans of weird fiction. If you liked The Thing and have also ever wanted it to be hornier and more emotionally complicated, this is exactly that. Go in knowing what you’re signing up for and it delivers.
⭐⭐⭐ Interesting concept, confusing execution. Wild though.
Tags horror, body horror, weird fiction, short, mood: confusing and strange
